I went on a fishing trip to Canada for a week. When I got back I had been locked out of this forum. I suspect someone purposely used my IP address to violate the terms of this site. There is no way to contact the forum if you get locked out by a malicious person's actions.
I got lucky, I contacted a person that is a member here and works on another Linux site were they gave his email. The next day I was able to login.
There should be a way to contact someone if you get locked out. Hopefully something can be done. I had been ready to give up on Ubuntu Mate and move on because of this incident. Forum participation and help are very important.
Sorry to hear that. It looks like lock out was a side effect of a spam influx on the 15th June.
The logs show the system deciding to "roll up IP blocks" (consolidating a range of IP addresses) but ironically, that range belongs to Cloudflare - but our Discourse is behind Cloudflare too!
The forum does store the IP address of each user, and the registration IP too. Back in the early days (~2017?), I remember notifying the configuration wasn't set right so all the IPs appeared like they came from the same one (a Cloudflare IP) -- for old accounts that is the case! It's very likely that due to blocking the spammer, it had a knock on effect.
From what I can see, these IP blocks were removed. Thank you @ricmarques.
Regarding the contact, there is an 'emergency' email at the bottom of the about page. We don't see much of @Wimpy around here, so maybe we need to change it.