New to vBulletin and VERY disappointed - Need advice

[singa]

I am not sure if I understand you. You're saying that I had a hack to my own forum? As I said earlier, the forum is part of a website that I run. I have never been into anything illegal. However, when I noticed one poster very late at night asking a very obscure question about something totally unrelated to tourism using a word I personally had never heard of, I immeidately googled it. And it was apparently some software of whatever that can only be activated if someone else gives a link and then another person clicks on it. That's all I know. I am no computer expert as you've probably noticed and in fact know very little about all of this.

But I did make one big stupid mistake. In the old forum there was no confirmation email required to register. I hadn't activated it. Hence this cost me dearly. Members were able to register and post immediately.

When I changed it later after I noticed my stupid mistake it was too late. A friend registered and some others and they all said that they got a porno redirect as their email confirmation which they had to click on to activate their membership.

There was even an instance that my website's forum came out like this: example.com/forum857575485458767857kfjsiuer873472iur with a very long number. and when I clicked on it I was redirected to a pornographic website.

How these people did that? no idea. But anyway, everyone in here is saying vBulettin is the best, so it is probably money well spent.

I deleted the entire forum off the server. Imported nothing to the new vBulletin just to be safe. I saved the most interesting threads in a word document and they'll be reposted / pasted soon on the new vBulletin.

Beleive me, I learnt. The first thing I did with vBulletin was ensuring every member will have to register with a proper email account and confirm the account.

Originally Posted by Infopro

You know, I'd be interested to find out more about how your SMF got hacked. If I was to guess, was it thru a hack you had added to your SMF forums?

You're posting to a forum for customizing/hacking another forum software that you're now using, so I bet you'll be adding a few things to your new forum too, like your old forum.

Here's a tip, SMF, like vBulletin are both secure software for the most part, it's what you add to them that raises your chances of being hit somehow or other.





The manual should have answered a lot of questions for you, the very helpful stuck threads at vBulletin are also priceless, IMHO, for grasping how the basics work.

You being here seems to me jumping a step or two ahead before even barely being able to make a forum. ( which was covered in the manual I believe)

Lots more to read, you might start with basics, like these two links for example:

Forum Robot Spam Prevention Recommendations
vBulletin 3.7 Questions, Problems and Troubleshooting

Keeping it secure and free of spammers is a lot of work that will never, ever, end. You will have to make time, or you can probably expect more of the same, no matter what software you use.

My 2

[Swampfox]

Originally Posted by singa

Beleive me, I learnt. The first thing I did with vBulletin was ensuring every member will have to register with a proper email account and confirm the account.

That will do nothing to stop the bots

The bot that spammed your forum was probably totally unrelated to your site being hacked also, they post spam

The tactic about asking a question totally unrelated to your site is, they hope someone will look up what they are asking about and post a link, then they will have links all over the internet pointing to their product, which will improve their search engine rankings

[singa]

This time I am using the Question and Answer Verification system by vBulletin and I have already prepared 10 questions.

So I should be better off than I previously was or not?