SPAM from somebody in '(COPPA) Users Awaiting Moderation'

[jnrdavo]

Hi guys (and girls!).

One of my boards just got another spam (50 pm's sent)...

I thought one of the mods had added the user by mistake, but when looking this morning, I noticed that he was in the (COPPA) Users Awaiting Moderation group...

I've checked the group permissions, and the ability to send email is disabled.

Is there somewhere else I should check to see how this happened, or could this be a bug?

Thanks in advance...

[cad2go]

emails are not pms

check the permissions again

[borbole]

In addition, have a look at my hack. It might help to prevent it from happening again in the future.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=235287

[AndyZ]

My board's been hit with this recently as well.

Here's the problem - “(COPPA) Users Awaiting Moderation” can send PMs by default. Some sleazy spammers figured this out and exploited it. I set this option to disallow.

Go to Admin Control Panel / Usergroups / Usergroup Manager / (COPPA) Users Awaiting Moderation / Private Message Permissions

Set the "Maximum Stored Messages" to 0 from the default 50. "If you set this to 0 users from this usergroup will not be able to use private messaging."

Same for "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation".

IMHO this should be default of 0. Hopefully this takes care of our problem.