ALERT!
TO ALL OUR WEBSITE USERS AND FANS:
Earlier this week, I checked in on the website message boards, to see if anyone had made a comment or asked a question, and I found dozens of new messages had been posted since the last time I looked. This was intriguing, but a bit odd that there’d been so much action in so short a time. Sure enough, when I clicked onto the Message Board section, I found blog entry after blog entry having nothing to do with Claypool, various advertisements (including many photos of merchandise for sale), and some porn (again, having nothing to do with Claypool). I contacted our webmaster, Thom Zahler, and asked that he do something about it. Thom reported:
“You’re not the only one getting spammed. According to the message board help forums, it’s happening to a lot of people. Some people are attributing it to an upgrade (which we haven’t done). It sounds like someone has created a robot that is able to automatically register. So, it’s nothing that we’ve done differently, just someone building a better mousetrap-avoider.
“I’ve deleted the big spammer and blocked him/it from the forums altogether. I’ve also changed the settings so that people who register will generate an e-mail for you to approve. If an automated program tries to register an account, so that it can post, you’ll see it and can deny it.
“I’m trying to upgrade to the latest stable version, but that seems to have disabled the message board altogether. I’m working to fix that now. We have a backup, and I’m trying to restore from that.”
So this is where we are right now, unable to maintain our own Message Board, due to some vile Spambot somewhere. We’ll solve this problem, and be able to communicate with each other on the site, but it may take a while. In the meantime, if anyone has any direct questions or comments for me, for Ed, for Claypool, please go to the CONTACT US link and E-mail directly.
Many apologies for the problem. We’re working to solve it.