Spam in Private Messages

[drscorpio]

We seem to be under an assault of spammers sending links via private message. Keep reporting them. 

[rawTOP]

The spam reports really do help. We can block the spammer's IP and reduce problems in the future.

In the meantime I've figured out the period of the attack – there was a flood of registrations over a 9 hour period. I've deleted over 600 people who registered during that time. There were probably a few that were legit that got deleted. Sorry if you were one of the few legits who got deleted.

[rawTOP]

I just also deleted all private messages from those 9 hours. You may see message threads with no messages as a result. (Too tired/drunk to get it right). I'll clean things up on Monday morning.

[rawTOP]

The attack is continuing. I've deleted another ~300 new registrations (apologies to the few new members who were legit who got deleted). I've also deleted over 16,000 private messages that were from users who've been deleted. Most of those will be spam messages.

Also – "new members" are no longer allowed to send any messages. Hopefully the spammers will realize it's now pointless to join. But I expect the next thing they'll do is try to do spam posts in the forum hoping to get to the next level of membership where they can send messages – though that will NOT get them to the next level of membership.

Please continue to report any spam you see.