[BillyMac]

I really learned my lesson this weekend and I thought that I would share my experience with other Forum members to prevent them from running into the same problem.

Early yesterday morning I posted a humorous response to a spam post. When I returned from my afternoon games I had received a "real" email from an esteemed Forum member stating that he had been put into a Forum "time out" and that he noticed that the I had also been put into said "time out". Sure enough I logged onto the Forum to find that I had indeed been put into a Forum "Time out", banned for "No reason specified", to "Never" be allowed to return. This sounded much worse than Double Secret Probation.

I got up this morning to find this Forum post by by bob jenkins: "Likely my fault, and I apologize. I was busy deleting lots of spam, and you probably got caught in the cross-fire. Did you respond to any spam posts?"

In addition to being "locked out" from posting on the Forum, I was also "locked out" from using personal messages, so there was no way to contact bob jenkins to tell him that I was in a "cross-fire time out". Now I know how the NFL players feel. Luckily I had the "real" email addresses of a few esteemed Forum members and I contacted them. One of them did some research and gave me the "real" email address of a Forum administrator. I contacted him and was soon taken out of my "time out".

Much thanks to those esteemed Forum members who helped me out in this situation. Special thanks to the administrator who actually got me out of the "time out".

In response to my "real" email he stated the following: "Best approach is not to respond to spam and simply report it. It's a tough job to clean up the spam and honest mistake to accidentally include you".

Lesson learned. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.