We realised that our attitudes towards some things have changed over time and Luster's original ideas were great but at times not very clear and too vague, so we agreed on some new rules & regulations for the forum. Please familiarise yourself with the changes here (not being aware of the rules is no excuse for breaking them). That thread will remain locked and sticky just like the previous one as a place for newcomers to check what is permitted and what is forbidden, but feel free to share your thoughts about them here if you want to. If you misunderstand a rule then you can also ask any questions you may have using this thread.
Aye! In fact, even though the updated rules we agreed on are more detailed than the previous ones, they are also more lenient because we realised that we've been breaking them all this time (such as the swearing one). It's pretty fucking great, innit?
Jokes aside, I gotta point out that the spambots we have on the forum (most of them either inactive and never found out or banned after spamming the forum) usually have links on their profile pages to advertise something. This varies from tires or lawyer firms to prostitution or drug-related things, so if you're looking at the user page of a suspicious new member and come across any strange links - don't click on them. You never know what you might come across; viruses, unsettling media or content that is illegal in your country and there's always a small chance you may have legal problems due to accessing it. I know not clicking on shady links is common sense for most people who have used the internet for a while, but I felt that I should mention this just in case.
The spambot corporations have been on overdrive lately, haven't they? I usually end up checking in on the spabot's profile page anyway because, sometimes, their "About Me" description is funny -though, this hasn't really been the case for the past several months. I confess on having highlighted their evil URLs and checked out their websites (rarely do I do this) and, most of the time, I end up being directed to some health/fitness wiki page or a companies car-parts catalog. Luckily, I have not contracted any viruses or have gotten any personal information stolen, thanks to my supreme master of disguise firewall and antivirus software o_0 I also (but rarely) send spambots a friend request during their Registration process. I've never gotten a response back from any of them :sad:. Oh, and thanks to whoever managed to fix the spambot thread infiltration -where they would often post one massive block of clickable text (it's been a long time since I've seen one). I remember when I was still pretty 'noob' here on the forum and I thought that a thread, with all those clickable links, was suppose to be a giant puzzle where you had figure out what the user -in this case, the spambot- was trying to say by putting all the information, in every link, together. I was so dumb
Ouch, good thing you didn't get your PC raped by that little adventure. But yeah, over time this forum has really gotten worse when it comes to spambot attacks. Nowadays (with tha powah), in addition to deleting any spam threads made and permabanning the creator, I also go through all the users that logged on each day to see if they have any advertising on their profiles without any posts made and ban them if I find any. Usually it's about a half of those on the list that turn out to be spambots. I remember that not long after I signed up here this problem was almost nonexistent, to the point that when spam did start appearing, no one really treated it that seriously until it started getting out of control, because they thought it was just something that will pass. But of course it only intensified. In fact, even though Luster (our first admin/founder of this forum) and previous moderators had it a bit easier at the start, I still think that Komo and Skaara are doing a much better job with removing all that crap. Aaron and Von Streff did plenty of work as well, but sadly they are no longer able to visit the forum often.
Fuuuuck. Today it was even worse. We have over 10 000 users, but the vast majority of them are spambots. At this rate new (human) members might have a hard time picking their names soon. :lol:
