Sorry that I was unable to notify the reason for the site being down for the last day, I had to immediately take down the forums as we had been infilitrated by spammers which were sending out thousands of emails and PM. It was noted at one point 1500 emails per hour were being sent and the quickest way to deal with this was to immidiately take down the forums until the solution had been resolved.

IPB the makers of this software have just realised a patch which has fixed this issue.

http://forums.invisionpower.com/topic/2829...ip-board-2-3-6/

Thanks to all of those who have pointed out the spam messages and notifying us of the site down time.

Cheers

Alex

Thanks for sorting it, although I was a little disappointed to receive an email telling I'd a pm, then not being able to get onto the site all day and then finding out it was spam. Oh the disappointment lol

yea a typical spam mail

the pm read " please help me "

hover over the link its a russian site, so probally full of spyware/viruses

Thanks to all of those who have pointed out the spam messages and notifying us of the site down time.

Cheers

Alex

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Alex - just a suggestion, but what about setting up a facebook group for times such as these, you can just send a message to the group and it's independant of this forum ?? We use this system on another forum and it works quite well.

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Alex - just a suggestion, but what about setting up a facebook group for times such as these, you can just send a message to the group and it's independant of this forum ?? We use this system on another forum and it works quite well.

Darren, FYI there is already a facebook group set up, you will see the link in Alexigno's signature area.

I take your point though that it would be a good way for Alex to keep us informed, thats a good idea.

Darren, that's a great idea. I never actually thought about using the facebook group for messaging when the site is down. I will do this in the future, see you on facebook :-)

i would have reported it but when i got the pm i was sleeping lol

and by the time i woke up the site was down

Actually, I realy don't like the whole FaceBook thing - but it does have it's uses!

I've joined the group, so next time there's a problem I'll get to find out about it!!

Darren

yea a typical spam mail

the pm read " please help me "

hover over the link its a russian site, so probally full of spyware/viruses

The "Please help me" link was actually porn sites, didn't browse too long, Honest!!

Well, i was browsing the net, and found that this spammer is a serious problem.

It uses two nicks, MUZRINKL and MIGNULIKZ.

etname: DE-KEYWEB-IV

descr: Keyweb AG IP Network

country: DE

admin-c: KWAG-RIPE

tech-c: KWAG-RIPE

status: ASSIGNED PA

mnt-by: KEYWEB-MNT

source: RIPE # Filtered

person: Hostmaster Day

address: Keyweb AG

address: Neuwerkstr. 45/46

address: 99084 Erfurt

address: Germany

phone: +49-361-658530

abuse-mailbox: [email protected]

fax-no: +49-361-6585366

nic-hdl: KWAG-RIPE

mnt-by: KEYWEB-MNT

source: RIPE # Filtered

They are using people to get around the captcha, and then running bots once the account has been setup. Unfortunately there is no real way of actually stopping this, even manually approving all registrations wouldn't help. The best we can do is to monitor PM/Email usage and add flood control to the forums which will only allow users to send so many messages per hour. It's a little annoying though when responding to several PMs, I've even set this up on my admin account to ensure that the forums are as safe as possible. We're also looking at adding live chat functionality which should help with internal board communication. Watch this space :-)

I did wonder why my PMs now have a sending restriction on how many can be sent in a given amount of time

I did wonder why my PMs now have a sending restriction on how many can be sent in a given amount of time

In several forums with this same problem, they started to control the flow on the site.And of course they installed the patch for this.There is not much more to be done.