It has been brought to my attention that a few users have received phishing private messages recently. These messages usually contain a link that leads to a malicious website and are from an “Administrator”.
Please be advised- any communication directly from an official VEX or IFI employee will never be signed simply as “Administrator” or the like. It will be the first and last name of the employee, usually accompanied by the IFI logo. Anything else is possibly a false communication and should be ignored.
I have taken steps over the past week to cut down on some of these bogus registrations and will be looking into other methods as well to further eliminate this problem.
If possible, require people to have say a post count of 5 before being allowed to sent private messages? Looking at the forum, creating a forum topic is far more productive than sending private messages in most cases.
But then people will spam forums titled “forum 1” “forum 2” “forum 3” and so on until they can go back to spamming. I say you have to hand-approve them. Let them post a couple of times and give them the yes or no, based on if they spam or not, or swear, or whatevar
I suspect you could moderate any user who’s first post didn’t contain the word “Vex” or “Robot”. Then you just block PMs until at least one of the new user’s posts is moderator-approved. I suspect this would eliminate 98% of the spam posts this forum gets, plus 100% of the spam PMs, while allowing most legitimate first-posts through.
Thats eaxctily what I think. Computers are great, but can only go so far. I mean, its easy enough to see peoples posts in a list. Just go through them and pick the rotten apples out of the bunch