Problems creating new user account

Someone contacted me recently as they were unable to create a user account on the forum here. I really don't know enough about the user account creation process to provide assistance. I'm guessing there isn't any contact info posted anywhere in the process on how to get assistance on creating an account which can make getting help challenging..

Here's what was messaged to me, I'll link them to this thread so they can see someone's suggestion here and allow them to create their account.

I'm guessing it has something to do with mitigation for recent spam attacks.

Ah, everything works great until it doesn't.

I had changed how the user account registration works, but it looks like the problem must have started when I changed it back to the original setting. It wasn't anything fancy or custom in any way, just selecting a different option in the admin control panel. So I don't know what the hell is going on. I tried purging the cached files, no change. This is weird. I'd understand it breaking if we had installed a mod or something, but changing a basic option in the control panel? I don't get it.

Guess I'll have to put in a support request on the phpBB forum.

And phpBB forum is likely to make you upgrade to the latest version of phpBB before offering any other support.

It looks like this version is supported until Jan 1st, maybe we just barely qualify for support. I put in the request, we'll see if anyone knows.

If it's not fixable soon, it's such a weird problem that it might be best to try setting up a test server and see how a migration would go. Kind of a pain, but not having new registrations is an intolerable problem. We usually have about 1 registration per day, hopefully these folks will stick around while this is being resolved.

Is it possible to add a notification on top of the registration page that it's having issues?

It seems to be working again. I didn't change anything, at this time we can either curse the gremlins or thank the admin fairy, I'm not sure which.

I asked them to try again now that things appear to be working, so we'll see how that goes.