Turned off Private Messaging temporarily

[Webmaster]

Apparently, someone has joined the discussion board and is now begining to spam various members... It will take us some time to go through the files to see who this is... please bear with us as we make sure that this is stopped now and does not continue..

Thanks for your understanding and support.
Stephan Lantos
IT Manager
NA World Services
stephan@na.org

[Webmaster]

My apologies for the problem in the first place. Apparently one of the recent patches for the software left a way open for anyone who was waiting for moderation to become a member to send private messages. That feature has been turned off again and private messaging has been turned back on...

Again, sorry for this occurrence.

Happy New Year to all!!

Stephan Lantos
IT Manager
NA World Services
stephan@na.org

[jmi1953]

Yes, I just received one of those private messages that was an advertisement for on-line pharmacies. I didn't think that this was something that you would want to allow!

Thank you for looking into it.
John
Tulsa, OK

[lucy]

fyi - this is a good website to go to when approving forum members... i discovered it a couple years ago and it helped me out alot...

http://www.stopforumspam.com/
you can look up the names/ips and get a pretty good idea if its a spammer or not.

[Webmaster]

Hi everyone,

Apparently we need to restate some facts about what and how it happened and what is real and what is not:

1. Early Monday (4 January 2010) someone/bot tried to gain access to the forum via registration. Our registration process requires folks to fill out a form giving some demographic information and some information about NA service experience... once that is done, the form is reviewed and if it is an NA member then they are granted access to participate. (for information about why we ask for this information, please refer to the FAQ)

2. Due to a software update glitch, the individual or bot (remote-controlled program operated by spammers that does this thousands of times a day) was able to send private messages to members of the forum... a recent update of the forum software returned this feature to default state-on, instead of previous state-off.

3. Some time later (an hour or two) we were notified that this had occurred... I immediately shut down private messaging and reviewed logs. Saw the issue and turned the feature back off and notified forum developers. Then I put up second post and turned private messaging back on.

4. We had one incident back at the end of March, due to a similar issue and nothing since due to the process of checking each registration. And also need to clarify: no one's email addresses or any private information was compromised. That information is secure and not visible to anyone.

5. Unfortunately there are many ways of causing mischief on the Internet--malware (trojans, viruses, etc., etc.) abound and the issue of security is getting trickier and trickier... Most large sites (and many smaller ones) including those of major security providers get hit and affected at times. We do better than most, probably because we do care so very much about personal anonymity.

Thanks to everyone who has shown their concern about this issue... We hope that everyone continues to enjoy participating in the forum or just browsing it.

Again, Happy New Year to all and thanks for your understanding and patience.

Stephan Lantos
IT Manager
NA World Services
stephan@na.org