Private Message SPAM

[rpd]

If you look any day at the bottom of the main forum page, you will see something like

"There are 200 users, 5 registered" . I'd guess there aren't 200 actual users or we would have a lot more lively discussions on the forum. Most of these anonymous "users" are likely web bots.

It isn't hard for me to imagine creating an account on this site and then building some scripting to spam PM messages to the user list.

I don't know if the user list is available to people, but active users could certainly be gleaned from the forum posts.


This is all easily doable. Its also all easily controllable but would require the host to improve security of their systems I think. not sure there is $ for that...especially to protect the 10-30 active users on the site.

Anyone can read the forum, but only users that are registered and logged in can post or send PMs.

The user list is easily available.
Just click on Members in the menu bar.
and clicking on the the column headings will sort the list by that column (descending), click on the same heading again will sort (ascending).

[dusty]

If you look any day at the bottom of the main forum page, you will see something like

"There are 200 users, 5 registered" . I'd guess there aren't 200 actual users or we would have a lot more lively discussions on the forum. Most of these anonymous "users" are likely web bots.

It isn't hard for me to imagine creating an account on this site and then building some scripting to spam PM messages to the user list.

I dont know if the user list is available to people, but active users could certainly be gleaned from the forum posts.


This is all easily doable. Its also all easily controllable but would require the host to improve security of their systems I think. not sure there is $ for that...especially to protect the 10-30 active users on the site.

Those 200 users to which you refer include all of the active users that are listed and the four or five bots that are also listed. The remainder of the 200 users is made up of the guests (people who are reading the forum but cannot post because they have not registered as users).