Hi guys. ADG here. I'm the owner and one of the admins for the Lefever Forum site. I sent Dr. Bob those direct URLs to the sub-forums of the site that still reside on the Informe.com servers and Keith was kind enough to pass them along to you. To save me having to retype what I've sent to Dr. Bob and Keith, I'll just cut-and-paste this here:
"Yes, those spammers are definitely up to no good. However, we've been dealing with those idiots every day for the last seven years on the site. That's why we have the registration process set to only be fully active after an admin (myself or BirDogEd) approves the registration. So even though they show up as registered users they can't actually post or contact members to spam them. Ed and myself usually delete up to 20 spam accounts per day. That's one reason we've been able to withstand their attacks for so long. Clicking on their link WOULD send you to the darker regions of the web so DO NOT DO IT!
I'm afraid what has happened is that the hosting outfit, Informe.com, has finally either given up and folded or has locked a lot of their client's websites. This weekend we had an unprecedented number of spambots trying to sign up, so perhaps this was a precautionary measure taken by Informe. However, it's certainly possible that the spammers have won, and one has gotten past our vetting process and has been able to gain some sort of Administrative rights. All of the administration functionality has been locked, so Ed and I can't delete any of the spambots as is our normal routine. The index page has been reset to default so none of our sub-forums show up although they still exist on the servers and can be reached by using the little "Jump to: [Select a forum]" dropdown menu in the lower right-hand corner of some of the user links pages at the top of the index page. I can't download or back up any of the site either, so it's a real mess. I've noticed a number of the other websites on the Informe severs are down also.
I've contacted Informe but don't hold out much hope of any response. I believe the servers reside in Eastern Europe so that probably tells you something right there. This site was made with basically a canned template provided by Informe so all setup was done in the cloud. No php or MySQL databases that i can download now, at least none that I know of with my limited knowledge of how the back end of these things work.
Thanks for checking in.
Larry"
If in fact the site has been hacked and the spammer has been able to attain Admin rights he/she might be able to start spamming the registered/active members. I can't delete members from the Admin panel any more and I'm not sure if members can deactivate their accounts from their Users page. This is just another instance of greed and maliciousness screwing up a good thing. By the way, I used to post here under the user name "Doc Krantz" back in the day.
Last edited by ADG; 05/02/18 09:03 AM.
