
Either this PHPbb installation is hacked, or sometime within the past 3-6 months one of the admins here made a poor decision to open user registration to the general public with nothing more than user-verified email.
As a result, several spammers have made it in here. Fortunately, the intruder(s) have been employing a conservative strategy, but I've still deleted numerous spam threads and posts and users.
A site like this simply cannot have open registration without a full-time admin team monitoring things or it will be overrun. Not to overstep my bounds as my involvement here has been non-existent for years, but I have set the new user setting to require admin approval for new users. (EDIT:) This means that @"Zac Miley" and I are a bottleneck for new users (see below).
If no admin opened registration, then we've got a much bigger issue in that the site is likely hacked and nothing I've done here will stop them from just turning open registration back on.
EDIT: At the momemt, only @"Zac Miley" and I are site admins. That should probably change to include, like, at least @tjuggles & @boyle and maybe @asmus too?
Whoever is running the show these days: sup?