In recent weeks we've been under assault by spam registrations (not just us; every phpBB website).  The Russians have had a breakthrough in implementing AI into their spambots, which as one admin put it, "are now generally smarter than your average legitimate user".  The bots can easily pass captchas, question-and-answer (which we use here), etc.

As a result, I've blocked certain countries from accessing the site at all:  Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Latvia, Singapore, China, India, Pakistan, Moldova, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the entire continent of Africa.  Those countries combined are averaging approximately 4,000 registration attempts per day.  Once successfully registered, the bots will post a message (usually with Russian phrases) trying to get someone to click a link or purchase whatever nefarious goods and services.

There may be some legitimate users living in those countries who are caught up in this (though more likely, they are using a VPN connection that passes through one of those countries).  Fortunately, the Cloudflare block message that's displayed gives instructions on e-mailing me about the problem; with the user's IP address, I can allow them through the firewall.

Even with these blocks up, I'm still getting one to three successful bot registrations per day, which is at least manageable.

Foul

misterspock wrote in 403 and 503 error messages:Damn, that sucks!

Well said!  

If I had to guess, Cloudflare didn't like something about that link that has ".php" in it.  Just a guess, because similar links haven't triggered anything.  Cloudflare has rules that help prevent bot attacks, and for some reason, it triggered on something in your post.

Since the post did eventually go through, it's possible Cloudflare just implemented a delay before allowing it through.  *shrugs*

I assume everything is okay now, and what you wanted to post has now gone through?

Foul

Quick observation:  the seller in the auction post at Lost Caverns of Tsojconth isn't accurate.  It should be BlackGate.

Allan.