sorry about that...

thanks for your help - everything is working now

ill just remove the SHA1 stuff.  is there much point in encrypting in SHA1?

It is more difficult to brute force. A 6 character MD5 password hash takes only hours to brute force ([a-zA-Z0-9]). SHA1 is quite a bit harder.

Hmm, that's odd. Is this a problem with all guest posts? In that case, could you check what user-ID your Guest account has? SELECT id FROM users WHERE username='Guest';

ill just remove the SHA1 stuff.  is there much point in encrypting in SHA1?

and about the deleted users.  at the moment, when i delete a user their posts are no longer displayed.  but i want to keep displaying the deleted users posts...

If you asked for the opposite, it's complicated. You have to delete the posts (and maybe topics) and update the search index for every post.

In regard to you second question, PunBB stores the password as an MD5 only if SHA1 hashes aren't available. If you've used the forum on a server with SHA1 support and then move it to a server without, you will not be able to login. You can request a new password via "Forget your password?" though.

my site uses the same usernames and passwords as the forums.  the weird thing is that this was working fine on my apache test server, but when i uploaded, as soon as you log into the forum the password gets changed.  i assumed that the passwords stored are md5 encrypted.  the odd thing is that the login works with the md5 password my sign up form generates and the new 'thing' that it gets replaced with.  however, you can no longer log into the main site.

anyone know what it is doing?

i had a look but i couldn't work it out... i know that the post dont get deleted, so i assume that there simply a query or if statement that needs changing.  could someone point me in the right direction please?

Thanks

MrBarby