Greystoke spamming the site

[electronjohn]

Originally Posted by Greystoke

I get your point and tend to agree but something else happened that resulted in me going all OCD on securing/closing anything I didn't need right now. I was slowly shrinking my digital footprint since retiring a few years ago but several months ago, my main e-mail account was flooded with over 1,000 messages from all kinds of random sites - many asking me to "confirm my subscription" and such. My mind instantly went to "I'm being hacked" which sent me racing down a digital rabbit hole with anxiety in the red zone.

I don't want any of this to sound like making excuses - not my intent. Before retiring, I was in the IT field for 40+ years and saw the havoc that can be wreaked from hacked accounts and that surely played into all this - but is absolutely no excuse for my mess.

Very long story cut short, none of this justifies or excuses anything. I just hope to make it right. And I hate that y'all have had to deal with it - I honestly thought it would get my account banned and posts deleted quickly and everything back to normal for y'all.

Tell ya what: It's going to take a moderator quite a bit of time to tidy things up. You might consider making a donation towards site maintenance, There's a link at the top of the page under "notices."

[Greystoke]

Originally Posted by electronjohn

...You might consider making a donation towards site maintenance, There's a link at the top of the page under "notices."

Absolutely - I sent a message to the admin Saturday about all this and offered to donate to the site/pay his time and am waiting to hear back.

I'd like to specify that a donation goes to VideoKarma, if possible, but I don't see a way to do it through that link. Searching AudioKarma, it appears donations to AK and VK are combined into one pot. That's fine - they share the same server and the same admin/owner - but I'm hoping to "pay restitution" toward returning to normal here as quick as possible.

[cj_reha]

Originally Posted by electronjohn

Tell ya what: It's going to take a moderator quite a bit of time to tidy things up. You might consider making a donation towards site maintenance, There's a link at the top of the page under "notices."

It really shouldn't take them a long time, though. One single account posting less than 5 things a day is perhaps the easiest form of spam to deal with there is, and on a properly moderated forum he would have been banned on day one. Obviously I am not excusing Greystroke here, but I think his ability to continue posting for so long has exposed this site as being extremely vulnerable to attack due to complete moderator absenteeism. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say a sufficiently motivated (and more actively malicious) person could bring down the whole forum or render it completely unusable in a matter of minutes.

It is extremely frustrating to me that there is a constant "please give us money" message at the top of a forum completely abandoned by its moderators, who will not transfer moderation powers to those actively volunteering to do so, and who in the first place took weeks to restore the site after it had finally been taken offline by crawler attacks (which had actually been affecting the uptime of the site for months beforehand). Apparently, they're not even bothering to cash checks people are sending in according to user teevee!! Greystroke inadvertently became a pentester for the forum, and it failed in a big way. I need to see if there is a way to locally back up this site because I don't think it's going to last much longer under current ownership.