For management and admin folk.

[Mike1158]

I run a forum elsewhere and have noticed something in the behaviour of the spam/phishing/link posters that you might find useful.

I had someone attempt to sign up for 'my' forum and things did not synch quite right. I checked the email address and it came up fine but it was for a piano mover in Oakland while the ip was Quezon city in the Philippines.

It seems the bleeps are scanning company sites for public listings of emails and then using them to create forum accounts. I expect this is for link advertising etc but thought it might be useful to pass this on as none of us want any more of those idiots than we have to. It might be a reasonable move to stop listing email addresses publically.

[rickstef]

We do advise members not to use their email addresses as their user names or in any public post.

We do have a work flow for approving new users and their posts, which allows us to review the post, and approve or deny based on content.
One of the reason why you don't see a lot or any spam posts on the forum, save for the few that squeak by or are posted by a hacked account.

We try our best, but we are human after all, so mistakes are bound to happen.

Rick

[whulsey]

Rick,

Did you get the pm I send you about what I guess is a spam pm that I received? Is there a way to delete it without opening it?

Thanks

Wayne - whulsey

[rickstef]

Wayne, yes i did get it

and you can open the pm without the fear of getting infected, no attachments can be made to private messages.

when you are in the private messaging window, and you are looking at all of the messages you have gotten, there is a square check box at the far right of each message
check that box, and then scroll down to the drop down at the bottom of the page, and select delete as the action you wish to perform, and hit the go button next to it, and it will be deleted

Rick

[whulsey]

Thanks Rick

Wayne

[Mike1158]

Just giving you a heads up, I nearly got caught out myself.