Over the weekend I - and even more important - my site developer (the technical brain behind everything you see here) spent some time for some important forum maintenance and house keeping.
First of all, we faced some serious spam problems during the past weeks where spam bots and zombie PCs posted a huge amount of spam into the forums.
Basically, this is pretty easy for spam bots and zombie PCs because they fake the submit command in HTML codes without being physically on the site. Nevertheless, this works - for spammers - pretty successful and I had a lot of work to get the spam cleaned out again since it was annoying and sometimes even offensive.

As a result of this spam bots and Zombie PCs, I've locked the forum last week to only allow posting for registered users. However, I'm not a big fan of locked forums, especially if it comes to article comments since you have to create an account first to add a valuable comment to a story. I prefer anonymous commenting way more and therefore we've worked on a code change to make anonymous posting available again but still keeping bots and zombie PCs away. Well, we have the code running for 3 days now without a single spam and therefore I think it's safe to say, that the code change works! :-) For sure, I'm not going into details but if you are just a normal reader of the::unwired, you shouldn't care anyway.
In addition, I'm also unlocked the other discussion forums again (which I locked some time ago - also because of the spam) which means you can access all forums now again, to post your questions, tips and tricks - without registering first; even if registration has some benefits but it's up to you if you like to do so or not.
By the way: The changes were also tested with Windows Mobile devices and it also works fine in the mobile version of the forum. :-)

While we did some house keeping, we have merged some of the old forums. In the past, I had dedicated sections for different HTC Pocket PC Phone Editions and Smartphones. However, while some of the old forums weren't used anymore (who is still using an HTC Wallaby or Canary today) some others were used even more. Now we have merged everything into dedicated HTC Pocket PC and Smartphone forums as well as merged some other forums. Nevertheless, we haven't deleted a single posting so you should still find older information you might still want to access.

Last but not least we have added an auto close functionality for postings. This means, that from now, a topic is closed 30 days after the first posting was made (it also includes article comments) and I would like to get your feedback: Is 30 days enough or should I extend it to let's say 45 days or 90 days?
The reason, topics are auto locked now is that older postings were "hijacked" in the past and visitors posted their question into any threads - doesn't matter if appropriate or not. To keep the forum clean, I've decided to auto lock older threads to make sure a new thread has to be created. At the end it means information is way more structured and easier to find. What do you think?

Finally I've also added a new category for Windows Mobile based Palm Treo Pocket PCs which is empty now (especially because the Palm Treo 700w is on sale in the US only) but with the soon awaited release of the Palm Treo 750, I'm sure we will fill up this forum soon as  well. Nevertheless, if you already have a Palm 700w, feel free to start using the forum already.

That's for now. Please let me know how the changes works for you.

Cheers ~ Arne