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

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 3:30 pm
by 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...

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

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 4:24 pm
by imperio
All spam has been deleted

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

Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 6:46 pm
by tjebbeke
vlahonick wrote: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.

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

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2016 7:32 pm
by vlahonick
tjebbeke wrote: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.

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 1:12 pm
by skurudo
vlahonick wrote: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.

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 1:38 pm
by Syeef
vlahonick wrote: 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]

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 2:02 pm
by skurudo
XoXiLhJ0mn wrote: 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.

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 3:04 pm
by tjebbeke
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.

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 9:26 pm
by vlahonick
Syeef wrote:
vlahonick wrote: 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.

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

Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 9:29 pm
by vlahonick
tjebbeke wrote: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.