I've made a few changes to the forums, as originally discussed in the shells forum:
1. The old Shells Forum is now the Shell Provider forum, specifically for user feedback on shell providers, as discussed in this thread. At the moment I haven't installed the mod to make it available only to people with half-op rank as originally planned, but it is now hidden to non-registered users, which might help things a little bit.
2. A new Shells & Bouncers forum has been created, for help with shell account usage only. Because this forum was not likely to have much activity, I've also decided to officially open it to discussion of bouncers, as it's been used for that purpose previously and "bouncer", "psybnc", etc. are always on the list of top searches for the main site.
3. I've manually moved all the general shell help threads from the Shell Provider forum to Shells & Bouncers.
One thing I noticed while fiddling with things is that the ability to search for a particular user's posts is broken, perhaps a symptom of having gone through many patches and by-hand modifications without a fresh install. I'll reinstall the forum software sometime in the next few weeks. Since this will take a number of hours, it will be announced beforehand.
It's probably about time I pruned inactive users as well (e.g. those who've never activated and those with zero posts who haven't logged in recently). This I will do in the next few days.