Why were the forums down for so long?

[MacGeek7]

Any one have any ideas or know why the forums were down?

 

[aethelbert]

There were problems with spamming from random accounts, some of which were dormant.

 

[MacGeek7]

Yeah - I saw Arn's bulletin right after I posted this thread

Hi all,

We were down for a few hours due to a large spam attack targeting the private messaging. We've cleaned it up, but the cause of the problem was Individual account passwords that were too easy to guess.

Please choose secure passwords. Those accounts that were compromised have had their passwords reset. You will need to choose a new password that is secure.

I had to delete many spam messages. I don't believe I affected anyone's legitimate private message, but be on alert.

Also, we upgraded to the latest vbulletin version. There may be some discrepancies and search may be broken. I'll have to check on that.

arn

 

[aethelbert]

Yeah - I saw Arn's bulletin right after I posted this thread

Yep. I got some spam and soon after that, the forums went offline, so I figured that was the case. After a few hours of it being offline, I googled the problem and saw that it was being worked with on the vbulletin forums by the one and only arn.