Thanks Andrew.
I don't suppose you know of a way to "move" the existing forum over? We'd be starting from scratch, I suppose - not that there's a lot to the present AR2 A league. I'd just be sad to see all of the other stuff lost.
And, would it be a significant cost to you? I'm guessing we'd have to buy (rent) a domain name at the very least.
Would you prefer us to try contacting Peter Thoman to fix the present website, or just shift across?
I think Peter Thoman is actively maintaining his other xxx.metaclassofnil.com websites. He's certainly still around, posting stuff to blog.meta... just last week.
At worst he's forgotten he's hosting armadillo.meta.... at best he's just ignoring it and letting it roll along.
Peter Stock said that acquiring decent captcha checks would "cost". I'm less convinced by this now, because it looks like more recent versions of phpBB (which is free) have better checks built in. But again, we'd need Peter Thoman to help with any software upgrades.
I agree that a simple question might suffice, but apparently spam bots are getting cleverer at working out those "question" blocks, especially if it's something that a google search would quickly reveal. That you presently don't have a problem is a good sign though. And the active management is highly desirable!
(Incidentally, thePits is now on Page 3 for me, because of the 100+ new spam topics since the last post in the challenge!)