Oh man, I got a huge scare (and a huge amount of mail) while I asked my mailer to get my mail. I have subscription switched on for almost all forum subjects. I never would have expected such a huge pile of posts in such a short time.

What happened here?

I had problems last night - but they were not associated with emails!

For my personal email box use a useful program called MailWasher to get rid of unwanted emails. It deletes spam and bounces it before it gets to your computer.

www.mailwaher.net

Some goofball(s) thought it would be funny to spam the MRC forums with 700+ forumposts containing crappy pr0n pics, and some stupid insults. Sorry for the inconvenience :/

Why do I think djh1697 has the same kind of problems as the spam on MRC?

But it's getting a bit off topic already, so... Thanks for the explanation, Snout. I hope this won't happen again. It''s really not funny to have your mailbox clogged because of some ... ehrm... how to say this politely ... ehrm... asshole(s)... Sorry, I can't come up with a better one and 'goofball(s)' doesn't quite cover it if you ask me.

Ah, well. We got free porn

Hahaha, always look on the bright side...

Hehehe.

I do think the posts themselves should be removed as well as the contents. It won't be so funny if search engines start to index this whole list of threads...

LOL, I received 150+ mails from 2 or 3 topics
Thank God hotmail only allows 2mb
Otherwise it would have been more

K

Ouch, forgot to remove the forum topic indexes. Done now Now all those nasty topic titles are gone.

The crap seems to be gone Thnx!

What about limiting the max number of forum notifications sent each day to a certain number, to prevent this from happening again? Or limit emails to one notification per topic since the last MRC forum visit?

~Grauw

How about preventing peeps from making such an amount of posts... problem solving is done at the cause (the postings) not the result (the emails). You should know that, you're a good coder

If you make a limit to the number of emails you can be sure the notification subscribed people will *never* be bothered like this again. If you 'fix the source', as you say, whenever someone finds a way to work around that, or if some other problem arises (resulting in the same load of emails being sent), people will get bothered by this kind of spam again.

So no, I think building in some safeguards to prevent future problems is *definately* a good coding style. In my opinion. As a good coder 8).


~Grauw

disabling the sending of notifications after a certain amount just cripples the whole system. If you subscribe to a forum you'll receive an email every time something is said in that forum. If the system would stop after a certain amount, it's not more secure or more user-friendly, it's just crippled as it would stop functioning (be it on purpose or not) IMHO ;P

You can always temporarely disable the notification for that particulair forum.