Business solicitation through the forum

[fuegocito]

Greeting to all,

I have just received a business solicitation(photoshop tutorials) from a forum member. I have never seen it being done before, is that cool?

Robert

[djdister]

Greeting to all,

I have just received an business solicitation(photoshop tutorials) from a forum member. I have never seen it being done before, is that cool?

Robert

I don't think so, and its against "da rules":

•Conferences, Workshops, Books and Gallery Openings - Announcements of conferences, LF-related trade shows, workshops, book releases and gallery openings may be posted to the Announcements sub-forum (one per event only, please).
•New products and services - Announcements of new products and services of specific interest to large format photographers may be posted to the New products and services sub-forum. Promotional posts (as defined below) require moderator approval.
•Other Commercial Posts - Except as noted in the two entries above, other "promotional" posts promoting your own business enterprise, or one to which you are financially connected (e.g. owner, employee, contractor), are not allowed.

[Alan Curtis]

I received the same solicitation today by way of a PM notice.

[David Schaller]

I too got spammed.

[rdenney]

Not cool. Action being taken.

Rick "no need for further reports--just delete PMs" Denney

[rdenney]

Turns out, a user's account was hacked. We have removed the PMs, but this is a new attack surface (probably) facilitated by a weak password. It's time to toughen up those passwords, folks. I will be doing likewise.

Rick "user sends his (confused) apologies" Denney

[Keith Fleming]

I also received a suspicious email today. Mine, however, was the announcement that I had a new private message from"NAZRAT." The message had the usual link for logging in to read the private message. Instead, I logged into the forum's website via the internet. There was no private message from NAZRAT. I will heed rdenney's advice and change my password.

Keith

[Jmarmck]

I think he deleted all those messages but you still would have gotten the email.

[rdenney]

The real Nazrat, on discovering that his account had been used to send spam PM's, reached out to us for help. He discovered the issue when people started responding to his PM's (and I can just imagine what some of those responses looked like). I suspect he also tried to reach out to people visible in the "Sent" folder to let people know that he'd been hacked.

But by that time, we had disabled his account and deleted all his PMs. We can't see private messages (they are, after all, private), but we can delete all the PM's sent by a user, and that's what we did.

Normally, a new user who tries this trick would be obliterated as an obvious spammer. But Nazrat had been a lurker for some years, and though his posts were few they were meaningful, and thus didn't fit the usual spammer profile. He has not followed the forum for several years and this was quite a surprise to him.

Anyway, it's all over.

Rick "back to your regular programming" Denney

[fuegocito]

Hi Rick,

Thank you for the swift action on this matter, I for one was not offended to the degree of responding directly to Nazrat but I was slightly concern. One among many reasons I love LLF is that the absence of commercial ads(Photo net for example), that plus the great group of friendly, talented and very knowledgable folks sharing their passion for their art/craft :-)

Hats off to the dedicated team of moderators and their tireless work to make it so !!!

Robert