Some posts going to moderation queue

Sorry for the inconvenience and I'll get it sorted out soon.

Haraga and Griff silver - your posts when into a moderation queue in the Buy & Sell forum for some reason. It's related to the recent spam attack. I'll get it fixed asap.

Sam I and everyone on the Café appreciate all you do behind the scenes to keep the Café up and running. Also enjoy all you posts and contributions. You're doing a great service educating the engraving community and keeping this amazing art form alive. You can pat yourself on the back for much of the revival of hand engraving in these United States and around the world. I know this endeavor takes up a lot of your time, but it is important and very meaningful. You've built up an archive of information on this site that would require a whole physical library to document all that is here. I'm an old school thinker and still believe a paper copy with it's tactile qualities is much better than in digital form. I visit this treasure on a daily basis and others I'm sure visit here regularly as well. It is vital to the survival of many people, as it provides the artistic nourishment much needed fuel to sustain us and inspire us, to continue to make the sacrifices required, to reach the level of quality in hand engraving that you've mastered and exemplify in your work. Thank you so much, and not to be taken for granted! Keep up the good work!

That's ok Sam. I can't remember what the post was about. This spring I plan on hiding my own Easter eggs.

Sam, although i dont have much experience with VB in the recent.., i ran a certain forum i own on it for a few years with little to no issues OTHER than spammers. i was able to combat them with requiring a more detailed and complicated set of hoops to jump through when registering but that doesnt work when the spammers are not bots, but rather are real humans being paid peanuts to spam forums. The best plugins you will find are the ones that blacklist by IP from a large database..
Now - the reason I moved - for whatever reason a few years ago some "anonymous" type group was attacking gun forums and taking over user accounts. it happened to another forum owner and it took his forum weeks to recover. i dont think your forum would ever be in the crosshairs of that kind of stuff, and this was just a few isolated incidents a few years ago, however, it prompted me to ditch the smf forum software and move to a free software called smf or simple machines forum. have been running that for a few years now with no issues.
VB is like the microsoft windows of forum software - so it just by statistics is more vulnerable to attacks because its very commonly used and the spammers and hackers already know how to maneuver within the code or software. at one point someone had broken into the back end of my vb database and replaced a few links with spam links that lead to a "no perscription needed male enhancement website". they only changed a few links so it took a while for anyone to notice.
we still get a ton of spam attempts but most are blocked by the aforementioned plugins and the ones that arent get canned by moderators.
the human spammers - there just isnt much you can do especially if they are not using a static ip which most are not.
i can say though the attempts are far less than when we ran vb software. the transition is "sort of" painful. all users will be required to choose a new password, as the password info is not stored in the database in a way where it can ever be accessed. other than that everything else will transfer over to the new software.
being your only issue is spam that is a big leap. i would first try a good plugin with that database i keep mentioning. being i havent used vb in years it may be better than i remember. pm me if you need any help.

One of mine went into moderation because I entitled the post Tool "P-o-r-n". So, the filters must have objected to that particular word.

mmmmmmm tool pr0n

shaime on you, dock !

monk, Tira, Andrew, Paolo & crew: Please notify me if you have to approve posts from regular members and not newbies.

Thanks!

Ok it's been fixed. Thanks everyone for your patience and support.

As far as spam goes, we've been very fortunate but a spammer got through and quietly spammed tens of thousands of pages of crap in the Groups section. Since nobody uses Groups it went undetected for nearly a month. Groups have now been closed down and the spammer banned.

We have pretty tight security here but nothing is foolproof. I've considered other forum software options but it would be extremely painful and time consuming to make a switch. In the mean time all is back to normal.

~Sam

Thanks for everything you do Sam. Even though we may not say it often enough... we really do appreciate this forum. It's wonderful that you have made it available to the world and it's time consuming enough without something like this to cause extra time and effort on your part.

You're welcome Doc. The only reason I brought it up in this thread was because I'd gotten an email from a member whose post went into a moderation queue and thought he was being punished or had his privileges suspended. Just wanted to clear that up any confusion

Interesting... I just got the "moderator message" on another post a minute ago.

It was over in the BUY/SELL in answer to the request for a source for brass or copper rings.

An explanation of how to do it yerself.

No cuss words in it!


Brian

Same message as Brian in BUY/SELL.

Brian & DanM: Try making a test post there and see if it still happens.
Thanks and sorry for your trouble.

No trouble... just put it up over here so's you'd know it's still happenin'...


B.