UPDATE **Personal Message spam attack - PLEASE READ**

[Alamy]

We’re sorry if you’ve received a recent spam message to your PM folder. 

 

Over the weekend a spam user registered and managed to send out direct messages to many users of our forum, which is hosted via a company called Invision Power. You may have received this message directly via email if your forum settings were set to forward direct messages onto your email address. Please be assured that your email address would not have been visible to the user when they sent the message.

 

Please do not reply to the message. We’ve deleted all sent and received direct personal messages (PMs) from this particular user and as a temporary measure we have also put a stop on any personal messages being sent across the whole forum.

 

We have processes in place to prevent spam, and successfully block several new registrations and posts every day without our users being aware. It looks as though in this case a loophole has been found to get round our checks, so we are speaking with Invision Power on the best way to prevent this happening in the future so we can hopefully turn the PM feature back on soon.

 

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

 

Please do not start any extra threads about this and please do not copy and paste the contents of the message within threads - it only spreads the message further.

 

Thanks, and apologies once again. Also, thanks to the many of you that reported this to us.

 

James Allsworth

 

Alamy

[Alamy]

Update 17th May:

 

A fix is now in place. 

 

After your next post, you will see the PM feature return. You will also see your status on the forum changed to "Verified".

 

The PM feature will now only be available after you have had one post approved in the forum so for any regulars, you will see no change.

 

We've also limited the number of new topics allowed via PM within a 24 hour period to 5. This means you will not be able to start more than 5 private conversations within 24 hours.

 

This should all prevent the issue from happening again.

 

Thanks,

 

James A

[DDoug]

Thanks, James. If you had arrows, consider the green one clicked.