And let me explain further. The whole idea about new members restrictions on the full use of the forum is to let people present themselves as 'real' BSA owners trough the first posts. As mentioned earlier, a few months ago 1000's of forums got severely damaged\destroyed\offline by some elusive hack.
But this needed a registration + full permissions to perpetrate. This hole is plugged, but be sure some are working hard at new hacks this very moment, and some are even paying people in third countries to do manual registrations in forums, and pose as valid members. Therefore the need for all these membership startup restrictions in addition to updates to forum software, increased server security and more frequent backups. It's all part of the joys of supervising a forum
The steps to secure the forum itself could lead to being looked upon as some elite club for the chosen few, which is not the intent at all. I rather hope new members will appreciate that they are coming to a website that do take security seriously.
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