As many of you already know, the site was victim to a nasty spam attack very early this morning. I have gone through the entire forum and deleted any reference to it. This also included anyone reporting it on the forum as well. All PMs were also deleted from the attacker. Unfortunately, notification emails included the spam and were emailed out automatically. This has been changed. See below.
To safe guard against this happening again, the following steps were taken.
1. The forum was just upgraded to the lastest version. This new version includeds a verification of new registrations on the site by an image of various letters. They must be typed in manually. This will prevent automated spam bots from spamming the board.
2. The maximum number of recipients sent out in a PM is limited to 5. This will avoid a broadcast spam.
3. You must have a post count of 30 in order to use the PM system. Sorry, but this is a necessary measure to deter future spam. The only way around this is to post over 30 messages or become a Contributing Member.
4. The "Do not reveal contact details of members to guests" option has been turned on for added privacy.
5. The "Don't allow post text in notifications" has been turned on. You will no longer be able see the reply to a PM in an email notification. This is important because now you have to logon to the site to read a PM (if this was on before, I could've deleted the spam before most of you saw it in your PM system).
6. Time required between posts from the same IP was changed from 5 to 15 seconds.
The only feature on the site that didn't transfer to the new upgrade was the Member Map. The current author of that mod hasn't released a version for this updated forum. I have saved the user data in future hopes of it being released. It's a small trade off at the moment to protect the site against spam.
Thanks.
Thanks!
Sounds good.
ur the man mr. bones
sounds good.
great work. hope this helps.
:-*
THANKS!! That was way too much before my morning coffee!!!
good job ;) im just glad I opened the message befor my 12yo did
thank you I bout lost my breakfest this mornin.
Thanks Bones
Is anyone else now getting spam mail with a smiley face at the end, like: It's Me, Melvin:) Anyone?
They started right after the spam attack.
i havent, might be those no pay porn sites you visit. ;)
No, Marvin :)
Thanks for fixing my playground Mr. Bones!
Wow. Thanks Bones.
Bones is the man. He works too hard for somebody to put crap like that on here. We already have to deal with Rico. Isn't that enough lol.
Yeah, he does an awesome job on this site.
Althogh, I kinda of think I'm his favorite, so I don't know what YOU'RE talking about.
Thanks for the work you did! I think the preventitive steps you took will now help.
You da man!!! 8)
I'm still getting emails about this so I'm bumping this to the top.
I had the same exact message from a PM on ATVNC.com from JessicaH :(
Looks like they are hitting everybody.
That was a bad one, opened it while my 14 year was next to me.
Thanks for the fix. Can't handle that kind of spam mail.
thanks!
today 11/13 I saw some spam ads for viagra and a couple days ago ad's for cigarets but were quikly deleted .both cases appeared to be posted on three different forums at about the same time