2024-11-17, 18:36 | Link #1 |
Administrator
Join Date: Dec 2003
Age: 42
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Inactive Forum Accounts (and how to Reactivate)
I just wanted to let everyone know that, to combat some recent spam trends, we've gone back to turning forum accounts to an inactive state if you haven't logged in here for 5 years. We did this in the past as well, but we hadn't been keeping up with this in recent years, so we had a bit of a backlog to work through.
It seems that some botnets are finding forum credentials from years ago (or taking advantage of compromised email accounts, or the accounts used overly-common weak passwords), and using these previously-active accounts to post spam, so bypassing some of the anti-spam controls we have in place when creating new accounts. We have no reason to believe that the forum itself was compromised, but if your password here is also used on other sites/services, or if you know you're using a very weak password here, you should consider changing your password. As a security best practice, you should use a different password for each online service to avoid credential stuffing attacks. If your account was set to inactive and you'd like to reactivate it, we're very happy to have you back! What you need to do is to post in Forum Support and ask to be reactivated. In case your account was deactivated as a result of an account compromise, you won't be able to log into it again normally. So, in that case, we invite you to create a new account and then post in Forum Support to explain the situation and prove ownership of your old account. Then we can swap you back to your original account and remove the temporary new one. By the way, if you see this kind of spam, please report it right away using the "Report" button, and we will deactivate the compromised account and delete the (rather vile) spam post(s). Thank you to everyone for your help in keeping the forum spam-free.
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