Ok, if you’re wondering why the forum is currently closed off blame the russkies. There is some search engine based in Russia that was constantly crawling through the forum links and chewing up a heap of bandwidth, database and CPU usage on the hosting server. The hosting company was threatening to suspend the Western Front account if their resources were continued to be eaten up, so I had to turn off the forum for a few days while testing the procedures put in place to block the offending IP addresses.
Hopefully that will solve the problem and I can turn the forum back on and all will be as normal. Thanks for bearing with us while we sort it out. Thankfully the rest of the site has gone relatively untouched and people can still access the gig guide and everything else.