Forum spam attack in here

[its_me_shaners]

So I was curious what was with the forum spammer that found his way here, I opened up my inbox last week and found well over 50 forum spam messages. Glad this got handled, I went out my head deleting them

[Larwee]

I will be contacting you about this by private message.

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Shane,

So sorry that happened, we discovered the problem. It wasnt an email spam attack (although it probably seemed like it to you) it was a weird bot attack on the forum and as a result the forum was sending you automated emails the way it's suppose to under normal circumstances.

So just to reassure you, no one got your email address and we nipped the problem in the bud.

You replied to an old thread that these bots were hitting with linkbacks from IPs all over the world. That one old thread was getting hit with 20-50 bots at a time sometimes - it was crazy. Normally you would get a single email letting you know someone linked back to that thread you were subscribed to. But that thread was getting hundreds of bogus linkbacks for some odd reason, so you were getting an email for each one until Larry started blocking all the IPs the bots were coming from plus we just turned off linkbacks altogether as another precaution. Those bots are still hammering that thread for some odd reason, but can't get through to do any damage now.

So again no one had your email. Luckily only 3 people posted in that old thread, but unfortunately you were one of them. We stopped it as soon we could figure out how to thwart the attack.
So sorry for the inconvenience!

Ahhhh the fun of running a forum!