First I want to apologize for the recent spam that was sent out late last night. This disgusting act was performed by a new member who used the personal message system within the Gaming Steve forums. No email addresses or personal information was compromised during this spam attack, he was simply using the existing features within the message board itself.
Shortly after this attack was sent out he was immediately banned from the forums and his activity was reported to his ISP. However, by then the damage was done.
As for the messages themselves, not even the Site Admin has the power to read/delete your personal messages, so you will have to remove those from your inbox. Again I apologize that you must be subjected to this horrible message.
Going forward we want to keep the Gaming Steve forums an open, welcoming environment, while at the same time add controls to help prevent something like this from happening again in the future. To that end we have added the following measures:
1) Effective immediately all members will have to post a minimum of 50 messages on the site before they can send out PMs. I apologize to previous members who were using the PM feature and are currently under the 50 message count. However, we believe that 50 messages is low enough for serious members of the site but high enough to deter spammers and other undesirables.
2) We are adding additional moderators to the board. LadyM and Oviraptor have done a fantastic job, but considering the size of the board and the speed in which it is growing the time has come to add additional moderators. These additional eyes will help with the overall management of the site and allow members greater and easier access to moderators at all hours.
3) As of now forum registration of new members has been turned off. Once things get under control and a few days have passed we will reopen registration.
4) We are exploring additional features which can help in the prevention of spam, such as CAPTCHA entries as well as other measures.
Again I apologize for this event and hope that something like this never happens again. If you have any questions please feel free to write me, Gaming Steve, directly either through the PM system or at
feedback@gamingsteve.com. Thanks for your understanding and let's put this behind us.
