It appears that some has been paying attention to GlasgowTheatreUnderground as we've been invited to attend the opening of the BBC's Pacific Quay Headquarters.

Thanks to the Beeb and we'll see you there!

Hey all, It seems that we've had a large (very large) number of user accounts created by automated spam systems. As you now we don't condone spamming in any shape or form, so we have been doing a clear out of all these accounts.

However, if we have inadvertantly identified your account as a spam one, drop us a line and we'll try to sort that out for you!

-M

In order to prevent the number of spam bots which are hitting the site, I've had to install a CAPTCHA system for all new registrations.

Basically you just have to type in the text in the image when you register.

Well we've cleaned up the spam in the forums, and as a consequnce we have had to make the decision to make the forums require registration.

We apologise but we feel that in order to continue to make GTU a worthwhile site, we need to keep the spammers out.

We are not however going to require registration for anyone who wishes to read the site or submit stories to us. Afteral who wants to log in every time you want the news?

Again we apologise to all our users for any inconvienience or discomfort you may have suffered from wading through the acres of Poker ads :-(

Michael

The spammers have targeted GTU again. This time in the forum section. I do not want to tolerate these parasites at all. So unfortunately, the forum section will be closed until we can deal with this problem. It means, for a while, GTU will not be interactive. But any comments and suggestions by e-mail are as always very welcome.

We have a new Guest Blogger for the next little while: Sarah O'Toole is the director of "The Talented Mr Ripley", which is on at the Ramshon Theatre in October, and she will be providing an insight on her Glasgow Directing Debut!

Sarah hails from Galway in Ireland, where she trained as an actor. She then moved to London and trained in Directing at Middlesex University.

As well as keeping us up to date with all her experience directing The Talented Mr Ripley, Sarah will also let us into her own thoughts and ideas about theatre in general (she admits to being a compulsive blogger already). So check out the guest spot by using the normal Guest Blog links or by visiting www.phoenixproductions.org.uk/blogs/seralu/*

* Don't forget you can subscibe to an RSS feed of Sarah's blog (If you're into that sort of thing)

Its been a little bit mad today. If you hadn't noticed GTU was down for a couple of hours, whilst we got to the bottom of a couple of security issues. I can happily report that these were nothing to do with hacking, more Bruce just not being able to edit anything he posted

In site news, we will be starting a new season of Guest Bloggers and our first on will be (hopefully) Sarah O'Toole, who is going to be the director of The Talented Mr Ripley(and hey! I'm sm'ing). Till we get the various issues sorted out with Sarah though, we're bringing Bruce's ramblings back on to the front page so you can catch up with the latest gossip.

If you are keeping an eye on the forums you should see a new form for The Talented Mr Ripley, I'm going to be putting up production info on there, so if you're in the show (and are registered on GTU!) drop us a line and we'll set you up with access to that forum.

And finally...
In case you haven't heard, GTU is now also a theatre company. Dancing At Lughnasa will be billed as a Glasgow Theatre Underground production, so make sure you check it out when it rolls into down. We'll be putting more news up as things happen.

And absolutely finally...We appear to be (at last) spam free. We'll see how long that lasts (hours,minutes, seconds...)

Due to the amount of spam we're getting on stories, we've decided to disable the posting of comments on all our stories.

If you want to comment on them (or anything else on GTU) please use the forums*.

We apologise for having to take this action at this time, and we will be looking at reintroducing story comments in the future....once we've kicked the spammers. Once again it is a few people (using an advertising scheme which should be illegal) making life difficult for a lot of people.

* Forums currently do not require registration but we may have to introduce this if they get hit.

GTU wants your contributions...unfortunately we're not in a position to allow anyone to post at will.

From today anyone who wants to have an article appear on GTU will have to submit it to us.

We're not going to be overly harsh or reject anything outright, we just want to make sure that the people who are posting are sending the best.

And don't worry if you're a serial submitter! If we're happy with you will bump you up to Author, and we'll stop harassing you!

Yes everyone hates adverts don't they, but (unfortunately) websites don't pay for themselves. Anyway in a small attempt to defray the costs of running GTU , we have started putting ads on the pages...ok only 1 advert, in the bottom right hand corner.

This I hasten to add is not the precursor to GTU becoming a paid for site...we hope to never ever have to take that step, and to keep GTU as a useful and FREE resource.