How to notify moderator of spam message?

[mhwarner]

I've looked around and not found any way to notify a moderator. I received an annoying personal message through the site this morning and wonder if others have as well. I thought perhaps Igor or another moderator might have a way to delete the sender's id before it gets worse.

Thanks.

mercy

New Member

Group: Members

Posts: 0

Member No.: 5,751

Joined: Today, 05:27 PM

I am Intrested in you,

my dear My name is Miss Anta Ngoya, i saw your profile on this site today and became intrested in geting to know you,i will also like to know more about you ,and i want you to send me an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address (anta_ngoya@yahoo.com )i believe we can move from here.I am waiting for your mail to my email address above. Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life.

Yours Lovely,

Anta Ngoya

[Lin Evans]

Hi Mary,

See my warning on previous post.

Lin

[Conflow]

Lin,

This seems to be a 'keylogger' which came in with post from 'organmorgan' see attachment below.

I sent the EMail to Igor and asked him to "ping" the routing of the EMail touting as 'MercyJohn' as

there is no such person registered with Yahoo.Com.

Note the 'Live-Icon' in the Header-Bar of the Post from 'organmorgan'......the infection seems to

be limited to those who repled to the origional query from 'organmorgan'.

PLEASE STOP COPYING THE MESSAGE AND PASTING IT IN YOUR REPLIES ~

YOU ARE SPREADING THE INFECTION ! IT SHOWS IN YOUR REPLIES AS "PH Code"

Brian.Conflow.

[Lin Evans]

On the other thread - add to "block" list from PM by clicking this link and following per moderator:

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showuser=5751

Lin

[mhwarner]

On the other thread - add to "block" list from PM by clicking this link and following per moderator:

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showuser=5751

Lin

Thanks for the info. I have blocked. Hope it works.

[dbturri]

Thank you for this information. I also received that disturbing email.

[JPD]

Samething for me : Miss Mercy John members N° 5751 at 6h27 pm

Here is my email address (mercyjohn2004@yahoo.com )

PM delete

[Guest Techman1]

Unfortunately, it seems that moderators can not delete users, only messages. Hopefully Igor (or team) will delete this user. Until then, we can all add them to our PM blocked list and you can also put them in as Ignore User (or both).

Now back to what's important here, PTE!!!!!

Regards,

Fred

[Igor]

I've deleted this user and his IP address.

And we'll upgrade to a new version of the forum's engine.

[Igor]

I just received the reply from Invision.

1. To solve problem with spam via personal messages we can prohibit PM for new users who didn't make at lest X number of posts (say 10).

2.

The only way to block "loggers" which are not keyloggers, just data loggers, via remote images is to block remote images entirely. This means, setting the board to not allow any images via the tag, and not allowing remote avatars.

It's serious restriction. What you think?

[mhwarner]

I just received the reply from Invision.

1. To solve problem with spam via personal messages we can prohibit PM for new users who didn't make at lest X number of posts (say 10).

2.

It's serious restriction. What you think?

Igor, it sounds reasonable to me. But maybe make it only 5 posts. At that point someone should have established him/herself as a serious user. And thanks for looking into this!

[JPD]

I just received the reply from Invision.

1. To solve problem with spam via personal messages we can prohibit PM for new users who didn't make at lest X number of posts (say 10).

2.

It's serious restriction. What you think?

That's a good idea

[Ken Cox]

mercy got more than 5 before she was stopped i believe

split the difference at 8

ken

[Conflow]

I just received the reply from Invision.

1. To solve problem with spam via personal messages we can prohibit PM for new users who didn't make at lest X number of posts (say 10).

2.

It's serious restriction. What you think?

___________________________________________________________

Igor,

Thats a reasonable number, at least it shows that the correspondent

is serious about PTE and not simply using the Forum to get a "Quik-Fix"

for a Computer problem which they should have attended to, and then

we never hear from them again ! (And thats happening too often)

Also many thanks for your EMail and sorting out the culprit...

Kind regards,

Brian.Conflow

[JudyKay]

Are we overreacting like a bunch of old church ladies to the color of carpet on the floor? If this is not a recurring problem, maybe a warning will let people know 1) not to respond 2) that forum moderators know about the problem and want to prevent it. Maybe that's enough for now?

I just don't want to discourage newcomers, until all that is left on the forum is a bunch of us self-serving stuffy old church ladies.

Now I am overreacting Ok, burnt orange carpet, 8 posts minimum to PM. I'm with "that" group of ladies on the left near the back. (No offense intended to the men here!)

jk

[Ken Cox]

you would react differently if you were a moderator and have gone thru what we have trying to keep the forum "clean"

ken

[cjdnzl]

Yes, a restriction on being able to send personal messages is a very good idea. Personally, I think 10 would be the minimum. I'd go for about 25, myself.

My reasoning is that a newcomer should ask their questions on the forum, and only use personal messaging when they have gotten to know who's who in the forum. I don't think that can be achieved in only 5 or 10 posts, and in fact I would regard it as cheeky if a new member posted to me personally without having canvassed opinion from the general forum inhabitants. Also, it would take about that many posts for me to be able to assess the calibre of the newcomer before I engaged in a personal exchange.

YMMV,

Colin

[Conflow]

Judy,

I appreciate the sentiment of your Post but you are under a misapprehension

with your advice...'Do not open the Attachment' for the following reasons:-

This type of 'Bot-Spam' contains code within the text of the 'Message-Body'

and does not require anyone to open the Attachment. The very action of

simply opening and reading the EMail is enough for one to become a "Radiator"

of this form of Spam-Mail. After a short time your Computer is Hijacked and is

used as a Proxy-Server capable of infecting 65000 Computers each and every

time you go On-line ~ this happens unknown to you and no warning is given..

Thats how dangerous this 'type' of Spam is and if anything I would consider the

the reactions of the Members to be very conservative...not that of old Ladies etc !

Hope this marks your card for future reference and your own security.

Brian.Conflow.

[xahu34]

Hello cjdnzl,

you should not underestimate newcomers. As far as I remember, I had less than 25 posts when I had correspondence with admin1 on file associations which led to another release candidate of version 5.1.

Kind regards

Xaver H.

Munich

[potwnc]

While there's no simple solution here are a couple of observations:

1) The last time I ran spyware/virus/trojan detection on my PC - quite recently - it checked for about 115 thousand known threats! There are that many of them out there because it's worth the time of the *******s who write this stuff if it works for them a tiny percentage of the time.

2) I once was admin of a (minority interest) discussion board. The spam eventually became so common relative to the real posts that I closed the whole board down.

Fact is that few people keep their PC protection up to date and the spammers/hackers know this and so we should expect this kind of incident to increase, not decrease.

Rather than a "knee-jerk" reaction to this incident (which is the first one I know of on this board), I'd suggest leaving things the way they are for now and changing the policy - to allow PMs only after a certain number of posts - if this repeats/continues. But then I keep my PC protection up to date and recognize spam/phishing pretty fast... we may have members of whom that's not the case.

My 2 cents...

Ray

[cjdnzl]

Hello cjdnzl,

you should not underestimate newcomers. As far as I remember, I had less than 25 posts when I had correspondence with admin1 on file associations which led to another release candidate of version 5.1.

Kind regards

Xaver H.

Munich

Hello Xaver,

Of course, a general rule will have times when it will not fit a particular case, such as yours with Igor, but I think most newcomers would be looking for advice about using PTE, and a private message at such an early stage would be somewhat presumptive - unless of course a more experienced member invites the private contact.

Kind regards,

Colin (New Zealand)

[Ken Cox]

I have edited out the post that Brian is referring to with his screenshot

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ost&p=50927

to minimize any problems

ken