Don't believe it.

Last night, a spammer managed to get an account and posed as an administrator of the forum. The user named him/herself "LadyROOT" and sent many of the users of this forum a PM with the same message: You have a virus installed on your PC and need to visit a website to get rid of it. As soon as I realized that this was the case, I deleted the user and banned the associated email address. Interestingly, phpBB automatically removed all of the PMs the user sent from the inbox of the recipient. So if you got an email from the forum saying you got a PM but there was none when you logged in, that was why.

I regret that this happened, but if you were foolish enough to follow the link, then, well, maybe you learned your lesson.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

I got that. It was quite obvious that it was spam so I disregarded it. I actually thought it was quite funny receiving a virus alert via a forum PM.

Did anyone check out the link and find out what the site was?

Literally *JUST* got another one, this time from "MannInBlackk".

P.S., looking at the member list, there are also newly-created accounts "StopAdmin" and "forumAdmin" that were likely created to send such spam from.

The problem still exists. I got one only the day before yesterday. There is obviously a security flaw being exploited. Have you contacted the writers of the forum script for a solution?

It's not necessarily a security flaw. It could be that a real person is actually taking the time to create an account.

I haven't found any good anti-spam measures that will stop these accounts on phpBB 2. The next version has a mod that seems to do a good job, but I'm not really interested in moving up to phpBB 3 just yet.

In the meantime, I've decided to hack phpBB to require users to have at least 5 posts before they can access the PM interface. It's not ideal because new users won't be able to send or read PMs, but at least the spammers should be caught by it.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!