What is going on with the fake ads & spam in the forum?

[vlahonick]

Dear admins & moderators,
what is going on with the fake ads and all this spam in the forum?
It happened several times lately and I think is time to address the matter.
Should we change our passwords?
Was there a security breach?
Should we be worried about our Vesta installations?

I don't want to 'spread fear' among my fellow vestans but I think somebody should tell us about what is going on...

[imperio]

All spam has been deleted

[tjebbeke]

Dear admins & moderators,
what is going on with the fake ads and all this spam in the forum?
It happened several times lately and I think is time to address the matter.
Should we change our passwords?
Was there a security breach?
Should we be worried about our Vesta installations?

I don't want to 'spread fear' among my fellow vestans but I think somebody should tell us about what is going on...

If you have websites running where people can post publicly, you always have spammers. It isn't hard to find a tool that can spam phpBB forums. I don't think you need to be worried. But you can always use some password manager to have everywhere on every website a unique password.

[vlahonick]

If you have websites running where people can post publicly, you always have spammers. It isn't hard to find a tool that can spam phpBB forums. I don't think you need to be worried. But you can always use some password manager to have everywhere on every website a unique password.

OK, agreed. What about adding CAPTCHA to the forum when someone tries to login or post something? At least this way spambots will be prevented from doing their job.

[skurudo]

Dear admins & moderators,
what is going on with the fake ads and all this spam in the forum?

What can i say? Spammers love our forums much. We try to delete and ban those bastards, but don't always get it fast.

[Syeef]

Should we change our passwords?
Was there a security breach?
Should we be worried about our Vesta installations?

This part made me LOL.

What has spamming on forums (which is very common btw) got to do with those?

[I didn't mean any offence]

[skurudo]

phpBB implemented Captcha possibility before 7-10 years ago. It is not so difficult to implement it for registration or logins. Thereafter this non-sense will go away.

afaik it's not 100 safe.
But we do something with this after release.

[tjebbeke]

There is already some kind of captcha.


CONFIRMATION OF REGISTRATION
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This question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots.

[vlahonick]

Should we change our passwords?
Was there a security breach?
Should we be worried about our Vesta installations?

This part made me LOL.

What has spamming on forums (which is very common btw) got to do with those?

[I didn't mean any offence]

The last time the spam posts happened (several days ago now), happened almost at the same time with the 'Vesta Hacked' posts mentioned by some other users. The timing was very weird and I run several websites and I didn't want all of my clients up my ass because of some forum stolen password or something.

[vlahonick]

There is already some kind of captcha.


CONFIRMATION OF REGISTRATION
Name of first forum on our Community Forum (General....continue):
This question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots.

Still I think it would be great to force the users to enter some captcha code before they can press 'submit' in a post or reply.