I just got a spam u2u message from «esther_4U», and I suspect others may have.
It's a classic daughter of a late husband and wife, whi need help transfering money.

I saw it when I checked my email. All of the U2U activity for that account will be purged momentarily. After that, I'll look at whether we can adjust settings or create new settings to throttle or quarantine private messaging from new users.

My research indicates this is a new problem. I don't think XMB ever had or needed U2U throttling before. If it becomes more common, I can write a code hack for restricting new users.

Another one, e_desmond, popped up today.

I guess new code is gonna have to be put in place.

Or, if you're feeling especially sadistic and cheeky, make it so when the user has below a certain amount of posts, putting in words or phrases in a 'flagged' list changes their whole content to a randomly selected slew of nonsense, screws up the user's password hash and forcibly logs them out and bans them... I somehow suspect they will learn to stop bothering after a short while =3

Thank you for the update. I've purged that user's activity too.

No, this will not be cheeky. I'm going to implement extreme messaging restrictions for new users.

Aw, would have been fun watching them trying to use the U2U feature... have there been any instances of users who registered to U2U an admin/moderator legitimately, though?

Attachment: ploot3.webp (10kB)
This file has been downloaded 4 times

(Also, apparently, the board can't detect if an img tag that was linked to is actually already stored on the origin server... Is this potentially abusable in any form?)

I just checked. These are the only 2 members with zero public posts and nonzero U2U records.

The latest registration here has a suspicious-looking username IMO. Wonder if it's from the same spam farm.