My sincere apologies to everyone for the inconvenience - and particularly to those who were immediately worried that their account had been hacked and/or otherwise put to nefarious purpose. NO - your account was NOT hacked, banned or in any way compromised.
In recent days, we have been upgrading our server software. I hadn't appreciated that some of the upgrades would affect the IP address information reported to the website by the server. I have now rectified the problem to ensure that the website receives the correct IP address of the user.
As an additional precaution, I have also completely purged our library of banned IP addresses. So, in theory, nobody can/should be prevented from logging in or accessing the forum. I am sorry that it is necessary to ban IP addresses and server networks, but the fact is that for every genuine forum registration, we receive about a dozen 'bogus' registrations that subsequently turn out to be spammers.
Cheers
Steve