Xena pointed this thread out and while I didn't want to post, I figured I better clear up some things.

Its true that we restricted membership to manual approvals now because we were being hit pretty hard by some SPAMmers - both human and bot. And while we try to get them approved everyday, sometimes we get behind (we still get hit by bogus registrations and have to check each one individually to make sure that we are not stopping someone legitimate from registering).

If anyone has ever wanted to register and wanted the approval speeded up all they have to do is write to the storeadmin email address and we will go in and do it manually. The same goes if you ever want anything or need help with something - I mean hell, you can always write to me at my private email address (guarie at iinet dot net dot au).

As for site updates being slack in the past - its true. There was a while there when I was not getting the front page updated every week (at one stage I think it took a month). But as Xena said, I have had some personal issues and it has made it difficult at times to be online. I've never made it known publically what has been going on as I do not want sympathy or want to use whats going on as an excuse, and I'm not about to go into it here. But if you had been watching or visiting the site in the last couple of months you would know that the front page has been getting updated weekly, the newsletter is going out weekly again and we've introduced a few interactions with members (Meet the Merchants, site polls etc) which have proved to be really popular. I don't think we have lost our spark at all.

I may not be online on the site for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week but I am there for at least 8 - 12 hours, 6 days a week when I can (even I need some time away from my PC). So if you need anything - just ask.

Guarie

Ps - Kalypso - I did try and get that problem sorted for you but never got it resolved by the Daz techs. I was very much motivated but there is only so much I can do when it is a technical problem beyond my reach. I'm more than happy to go at it with them again if you would like me to.