Chris Perkins

He's got no chance at all! You can buy piles of old rubbish all day long, all your going to get is poorer, you're not going to get any 1933 pennies, regardless of what clueless sellers say! No one wants to throw away £200, but it could have been a lot worse!

I tell you what, since I've switched to manual member approval I've been getting 3-5 attempts everyday from people with .ru email addresses and/or registering names like cheap-vigra and win-casino! When someone registers a new account now, there is a message saying that accounts registered from certain countries will not be approved until the registrant emails to show a genuine interest etc etc. I've emailed a couple of suspect accounts but they didn't reply and therefore got zapped. The results are good though, since being picky about who is allowed in, there has been less spam.

Ok, please email a picture to cp@predecimal.com

Done that! I knew I'd seen that setting somewhere! (the admin area is totally different for me now)

It should be like before, they should be dark blue when there's something new. Unless you were using an alternative skin (of which none of them work properly yet!)? I need to sort out the skins too, so when that's done, if you change it you might get it back to how it looked for you.

Very interesting thread, well done TomGoodHeart (the same idea did cross my mind actually, but I thought I'd let someone else get the glory). As it's technically sort of a fake and I collect fakes, how much do you want for it Geordie?

Ok, I shall take your suggestions in most sincerely!

How do you think I should customise it? I want to put predecimal and rotographic banners at the bottom, and I want links at the top too. What else?

Invision based sites all look the same....I'll be customising it when I get a moment.

You should also be able to post in the forum like you did before. Do you get an error message?

You may have noticed the new style forum! It's still in it's default state at the moment, so I'll to predecimalise it will be the next job.

Those are Chinese. They looked like that up until about the begininning half of the last century. The writing will tell a Chinese reader the province name and the ruler. Most are very common and have very little value.

No doubt the Royal Mint are taking in the bronze coins as quickly as possible, selling the metal and replacing them with copper plated steel examples as we speak!

Taking Russia and a few other selected nations completely offline would probably reduce it by about 80%

It ruins it for the millions of normal non spamming people doesn't it! I seriously think that it's a problem governments need to address. All the spam traffic uses up so much world bandwidth, and it's always the same nation culprits (mainly Russia in my case).

It's a right pain isn't it! I think I might have to switch over to only allowing registered users to post but only when they've been manually approved...Which is a shame because that will discourage a lot of people.

Have you got a bag or 2 of 1966 halfpennies?

Just to let people know that I have recently purchased (yes, more money spent!) the latest version of the Invision forum software. It'll have new features and it will look better! Hopefully I can make it more spam proof too. I'll also be installing an add on which will alow users to setup their own coin photo gallery! Much like what is done on another site that you probably all know about! You'll be able to easily share pictures of your coins with all the forum users in your own sort of coin photo album. The forum upgrade will go on over the weekend at some point (I hope) and the photo add on will be added once that first stage has gone smoothly. There are a few unknown variables, so while I'll try to make sure there is very little down time during the switch, you'll understand if the forum doesn't run well or is not available over the weekend.

Is it! I wish I'd sourced these before the Chinese got hungry for copper! Ok, then £72 per bag is what I'll pay!

Has anyone got one or two mint £5 face value bags of 1966 halfpennies? Or a large quantity of that date? I've got 2 bags but I need 4 for promotional purposes. I'll pay an outrageous £60 per mint bag!

It's only illegal to melt down current coins (so I heard, basically to allow people to melt down pre 47 silver) so theoretically you could sell your bronze old pennies to the scrap man!

No, not really but I do have to keep my wits about me, and an eye on it a few times a day at least.

I've blocked another 2 people from registering today already....Someone with a .ru (Russian) email address and someone who's email address started 'cheat-casino' (we get a lot of Casino spam too, but I delete it very quickly)!

All the ones I've seen have been 8/7 and I've always been led to believe that was the case for all of them.

After all the dodgy links to porn, medications and various other spam commodities by new members, I have now set up the forum to email me each time a new member joins. I then have to manually approve the account before they can start posting. Any accounts originating in Russia, China, or the usual spam server countries will not be approved by default unless the user can demonstate over email a genuine interest in coins! It's such a shame people abuse the freedoms of this forum.