The forum is now back online.
The problem was that I was getting some strange spam-like emails being sent to me from the forum. I never found out why this was happening – maybe it was someone trying to hack into the forum, maybe it was just a bug in SMF. But I have upgraded to the latest SMF version (2.0 RC4) and this seems to have solved the problem, for now at least.
I also took the opportunity to delete the spam user accounts (that have been building up again!) and also tweak the forum settings a bit. I have disabled the ability for guests to view user profiles. This means that if spammers sign up fake accounts and then put links in the profiles, then no-one (apart from regular forum users) will be able to see those links. It probably won’t stop the spammers, but at least they won’t be getting any benefit from spamming my forum any more.
Very cool, I’m catching up on forum entries… thank you for cleaning it up, I recall thinking (about a year ago) that spam stuff was going to be a problem. Nice work.