No virus, just spam

cyberia · #1 (**permalink**) April 28th, 2008, 11:41 PM

This evening it came to our attention that a new member, D Day Girl, was sending spam PMs to the membership. She refused to contact the moderators and Jim O has banned her.

Concerns were raised that this may have been a virus threat, but Jim checked into it and it turns out the site is reputable with no evidence of virus.

All out going PMs have been modified to alert members that this was a spam issue.

Kudos to Kenteck and Wüstenfuchs for bringing this to our attention so it could be dealt with.

The Zone has a no spam policy that will be enforced.

cyberia · #2 (**permalink**) April 28th, 2008, 11:57 PM

Addendum: If anyone in the membership sees something out of place or suspicious, please, just send a PM to any moderator on site or use the Report Post function.

cyberia · #3 (**permalink**) April 29th, 2008, 10:34 AM

I noticed a lot of you reading those PMs this morning and wanted to bring this thread out front again.

Whiterook · #4 (**permalink**) April 30th, 2008, 08:23 AM

Thanks for bringing this to the fore, Paul. I hate SPAM....though the actual canned meat product is delicious fried, with hash and toast.....now I'm hungry! Seriously though, I for one (and I am sure I speak for many folks here at the Zone) am very thankful that this site has zero tolerance on SPAM, whether through PMs (which is a first, that I've seen in a Forum), or annoying repeat threads (very prevalant on another site many of us are familiar with).

I am curious though...how could you tell many members were reading the SPAM PMs....do you and Jim have Spidy sense's? (That'd be SOOOOOOOOOO cool!)

McCoy · #5 (**permalink**) April 30th, 2008, 08:54 AM

We know!

This lyrics tells it all...

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been.
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time,
Provided with toys and 'Scouting for Boys'.
You bought a guitar to punish your ma,
And you didn't like school, and you
know you're nobody's fool,
So welcome to the machine.

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream.
You dreamed of a big star,
He played a mean guitar,
He always ate in the Steak Bar.
He loved to drive in his Jaguar.
So welcome to the Machine.

Jim O · #6 (**permalink**) April 30th, 2008, 11:05 PM

In case there are any questions, the user in question, D-Day Girl, made 17 PM's to five people each. That was a total of 85 recipients. There had been a couple of complaints already and she had ignored a PM sent to her by one of the super mods. My response was to ban her as one of the recipients had shared the content of the PM and it was obvious spam.

Because of the concern as to whether the link contained in the message was malicious I went into the database and deleted the message text from those 17 PM's to those 85 recipients. I also clearly marked that I had done so.

For those that do not understand, the way ALL forums work is that posts and other information, including PM's, are stored in a database. That database is by necessity accessible to the webmaster/administrator. There are times when database administration, maintenance, backup, optimization, etc, demand just that. So I have access to the database. Do I make a habit of reading private messages? Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so.

This same type of access is available to admins on virtually all forums.

If the fact that I have such (generally unused) access bothers you then I suggest that you not use the PM system here. After all it's only the government monitoring your email and telephone.