Apologies to all forum users who received spam as a private message from a username "theright". Someone registered a legitimate account and then used it to run a script to send spam out to users one by one.
As they did this overnight, it was only in the morning that I noticed loads of emails from members replying angrily about biofuels forum sending spam and asking me to not email them.
There were 1,914 private messages that were sent. As most of you have your control panel preferences set to automatically email a notification when a private message is sent, then many of you would have also been emailed with the spam.
I have since banned and blacklisted this user and also deleted all these private messages.
I don't know what the answer is to properly preventing this sort of thing in the future, but I will investigate some. Whilst there are many walls and barriers, as well as a good team of moderators that constantly monitor and delete all the spam that gets publicly posted, there is not really any easy way to monitor private messages as they are... well, er, private. I can only tell this has happened when people send me nasty email replies to the notifications.
If you have received one of these emails, please just delete it. The private messages have been deleted en mass from everyone's mailboxes in here.
As they did this overnight, it was only in the morning that I noticed loads of emails from members replying angrily about biofuels forum sending spam and asking me to not email them.
There were 1,914 private messages that were sent. As most of you have your control panel preferences set to automatically email a notification when a private message is sent, then many of you would have also been emailed with the spam.
I have since banned and blacklisted this user and also deleted all these private messages.
I don't know what the answer is to properly preventing this sort of thing in the future, but I will investigate some. Whilst there are many walls and barriers, as well as a good team of moderators that constantly monitor and delete all the spam that gets publicly posted, there is not really any easy way to monitor private messages as they are... well, er, private. I can only tell this has happened when people send me nasty email replies to the notifications.
If you have received one of these emails, please just delete it. The private messages have been deleted en mass from everyone's mailboxes in here.
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