my apologies for accidental banning

[Garth]

To all our legitimate and esteemed members:

Recently, we've had quite a few new (ab)users register and post something that shows no knowledge or interest in the HP-41 (or any other HP calculator for that matter), just so they can put in a link for, or otherwise advertise, their unrelated computer games.  I assume this is partly just an effort to get the search engines to rank them more highly.  Years ago, I saw spammers nearly destroy another forum I'm on (but was not a moderator for).  That forum still exists, but the spam left a bad taste in everyone's mouths, reducing the traffic to nearly zero, and it never really recovered.  I resolved to never let that happen to any forum I moderate.  When I see these new fraudulent sign-ups and posts, I ban their user name and email address; and on other forums, I ban their IP address for six months too, all with "spam" or "spam source" in the explanation line, then delete the (ab)user and his posts.

Tuesday I made a big mistake.  The way this forum is set up, everyone's IP address shows up the same, so banning it bans everyone, including myself, and I clicked on the wrong thing, meaning to ban the abuser's email address, but instead clicked on the IP address ban option.  I had to email jotne and confess my mistake and ask him to fix it.  If you tried to look at the forum in the last couple of days and got a message that you were permanently banned, that's why.  My apologies.  We have very valuable members here and I definitely do not want to offend anyone.  This was totally an accident.