PM Spam

[AllanMarcus]

I just received a very suspicious email that looks like a notification that I received a message on Audiophile Style. The subject of the message was "Lottery among members of the forum.". Because it has a link to "form.gifts", which looks pretty suspicious, I came directly to the site. I don't have anything in my inbox, so that confirms the email I received is fake. The message was from "Danielle_Martin".

 

Can a site admin confirm what's going on? I changed my site password. Should everyone?

[yamamoto2002]

@The Computer Audiophile Do you considering about recurrence prevention? For example, on new account creation, person should pass `entrance exam' of several audio related questions or something 😀

[The Computer Audiophile]

Just now, yamamoto2002 said:

@The Computer Audiophile Do you considering about recurrence prevention? For example, on new account creation, person should pass `entrance exam' of several audio related questions or something 😀

I tried that in the past and it failed to even slow down these guys. 

[sandyk]

47 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I tried that in the past and it failed to even slow down these guys. 

Chris

 If they are smart enough to do what they did, they will always find a way to beat the system.

All that you can do is what you have already done.

 

Regards

Alex

[The Computer Audiophile]

9 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Chris

 If they are smart enough to do what they did, they will always find a way to beat the system.

All that you can do is what you have already done.

 

Regards

Alex

Agree. It gets really crazy when trying to prevent a rogue nation state from doing whatever it wants. Anyway, I just made a major change to how users are created in the system and what rights they have as users without any posts versus users with at least one post. Also, as usual, users' first post has to be approved by me.

 

Fingers crossed I don't wake up Sunday am to another several thousand emails :~)

[MadCow]

Wow, I haven't been here for ages (last time I was here, this site was called The Computer Audiophile - which made me scratch my head wondering if I was receiving spam or something), and today the PM spam message brought me back. 😅

 

Have to say PM spam is a pretty common annoyance especially on larger forums. Many thanks to the admin for cleaning this up so quickly, by the time I logged in to check, the message was gone.

 

Also wanted to comment, a lot of forums these days tend to have restrictions on new users, like not being able to post links or images until they have at least 10 or more posts, minimum time between each PM, and so on. I suppose the "first post needs approval" here works if the forum isn't too busy, compared to the more automated minimum-posts-to-do-anything-significant rule, but just throwing this suggestion on the table in case it may be useful.