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Guys - I can help I think as I had this problem too ever since I installed IE8. I can't get into the chatroom either with internet explorer. It seems Java has problems with IE8. In the end I found if I installed Firefox, I could get in - so that's what i would recommend.

MaryME - I think due to a load of spambot trouble earlier in the year on the site, I believe certain things are disabled for new posters, the ability to send PMs being one of them. (It was confirmed this is the case by MaryO earlier in this thread - see posts 467/ 468) Once you have posted a certain number of times (I don't know how many) you should find you will be able to do this.

Correct my post above to say when the "board" was down, not the entire site! LOL

RE your friend - if she is still getting the driver error message, then it may be she has an old copy of the PS page in her browser and needs to 1) empty it out and 2) set it to look for updated pages.

Kath, I'm in the Uk, I didn't have any problems today, however, i did last week when the site was down. I've been coming here for a few years now and the site does does down occasionally (often due to hackers or site updates) but it always comes back again. Driver error is usually the message you get when it happens. Just try again later. There is a temporary board http://www.quicktopic.com/33/H/NDHffQWfq3HVW if the site is down for a long time.

This is the latest spambot to target the site. I wonder whether some sort of vetting could be put on new members for now or whether that would be too much of an overhead depending on how many we get per day. Or maybe limit the number of posts they can make in a day or something so they cannot get through the x posts to be able to PM limit. I noticed the spammer last night managed to repeatedly post the aaaaaaaaa message several times a minute despite the repeat post flood control having being upped to once every 60 secs recently. Wonder how it's getting through that.

Only a guess Nancy but it might be that due to the number of spam-bots around recently that some boards are only allowing PMs from those members with a certain number of posts. Might explain why todays spambot intrusion has created several posts saying aaaaaaaa before it started to try and PM people. This is only a guess but i have read about other boards doing this.