It's always something! I noticed that there haven't been any new registrations in 24 hours. That's strange, as there are always a few. I tried to register myself, and realized that the page wasn't showing that random recaptcha image anymore, but of course was still requiring people to type one in (that didn't exist). I looked at the Contact Me link, where people would/could complain about the problem, and it of course is protected by the now non-existent recaptcha service as well, so people couldn't contact me.

What that link is doing now: http://recaptcha.net/api/getkey?app=vBulletin

returns:

Not Found - Error 404

I switched it to a simpler spammer prevention image library, which is now back up and running. Not sure why the recaptcha.net servers suddenly stopped serving vbulletin requests, but glad I found the issue. If this affected anyone here over the last day, my apologies. Hopefully the spam prevention won't be too adversely affected by the simpler library, up until recaptcha gets back up and running.

User error. (the user being me). When switching to SSL, the old link to the recaptcha libraries breaks. Needed to point it to the new ssl-based library, and it's functional again. :thumbup:

Took two tries, as I was starting to see errors in the logs again; I had mistyped one reference to "httpss://" instead of "https://". Registrations were still working, but since I was seeing failures in the logs it must have been breaking something.

Between this fix and the email reliability fixes, active user count has climbed by about 100 in a week or two, which is a positive trend. :thumbup: