The sharp-eyed may have notice our member count has dropped.
Before the new year I wrote to 21 old (May to August) registered members who had never visited the forum since registering. This was under the old self-validation system and the chances are that as most used Hotmail and AOL email address they never received the validation email.
Anyhoo, I asked them to email back if they still wanted to be registered and I would do it manually, and if they didn't reply the user name would be deleted after 7 days. Six replied, one of which had realised what had happened and had tried again under a different name & email address, five replied positively, 15 didn't reply. So I have removed one unwanted name and 15 unwanted accounts.
As an aside, since changing to V3 phpBB I haven't had one attempted spam registration - previously there were 1 to 3 per day. Still, it's only a matter of time before they catch up 
yup... php 2 did seem particularly popular with spammers...
There's probably some generally available software for spamming it available or something.
David , can you check out user "conspiracy" as I suspect its Oddball or Steve D ? Duplicate accounts is something I think we should crack down upon , deleting the new one and giving a final warning to whoever created it . The only reason for having them as far as I'm concerned is trolling, which is contrary to the aims of this forum IMHO .
Already have done - no correlation I'm afraid!
can we lock out the account subtly, ie change it's password and wait to see if anyone gets in touch ?
Yup... Conspiracy is the only person to use that IP address.
I suggest suspending the account.
Well, conspiracy hasn't been back on since that one post so I've deleted the account.
Incidentally, if you haven't noticed it yet - on each forum post there is an question mark icon. Click that and you will see a load of info including IP addresses that the poster has used which you could compare with suspected duplicate account user. It's not proof as most users ISPs will have pooled and shared addresses but it will be a pointer.
* Pointless edit made to test edit reporting... ignore this line *