The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed a few spam posts going up, this appears to be an isolated attack from a single source but is evading the spam filters. So, sadly, for now posts from new members (those who've never posted before) will have to go into an approval queue before they'll show up. Sorry to those genuine new members to the site for the inconvenience, we haven't had to do it this way for a while now. ::)
Thanks for your continued vigilance. :)
Okay, so the flood appears to have subsided and the CleanTalk plugin is taking care of the remainder, so I'm relaxing the first post restriction again. I've also removed the (largely ineffective) IP-address based bans which were causing some innocent real users to have issues. There are still some restrictions on email services which are not permitted (mostly .ru mail servers of various types) but these days IP addresses are recycled so often there's a lot of address sharing that makes it a scattershot approach to blocking spammers at best.