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Update: chat issues
TheMix
Posts: 3,040 Boards Guru
Hey everyone,
So just a quick update on what's been happening with chat recently. To recap...
On Sunday and Monday night, a spammer came into chat and sent everyone to a spam site. As you might remember, on Tuesday, as a temporary fix, we put passwords on all chat rooms to foil any more spam attempts. There were no incidents, but putting passwords up really isn't ideal.
Yesterday we put in a few extra anti-spam measures, but as lots of you discovered, these broke chat a little bit (oops!). Apologies to those of you who couldn’t log in and then had extra things added to your messages last night! :rolleyes:
Now, we've been working hard to find a workable solution; a way to spam-proof ourselves but also make sure everything works as it should. After a lot of fiddling, it looks like we've managed to do that. As far as we know, we shouldn't have any issues with chat this evening and things should work as normal.
On behalf of the staff team, thank you SO much for bearing with us over the past few days while we get to the bottom of this. Just so we're being extra-safe, it'd be a good idea for everyone to run a quick virus/malware scan on their devices. We're pretty sure things should be clean, but just in case.
We're going to be moving to new chat software very soon, so we'll finally be able to say goodbye to Flashchat and all its annoying bugs...
- Mike, James & Aife
So just a quick update on what's been happening with chat recently. To recap...
On Sunday and Monday night, a spammer came into chat and sent everyone to a spam site. As you might remember, on Tuesday, as a temporary fix, we put passwords on all chat rooms to foil any more spam attempts. There were no incidents, but putting passwords up really isn't ideal.
Yesterday we put in a few extra anti-spam measures, but as lots of you discovered, these broke chat a little bit (oops!). Apologies to those of you who couldn’t log in and then had extra things added to your messages last night! :rolleyes:
Now, we've been working hard to find a workable solution; a way to spam-proof ourselves but also make sure everything works as it should. After a lot of fiddling, it looks like we've managed to do that. As far as we know, we shouldn't have any issues with chat this evening and things should work as normal.
On behalf of the staff team, thank you SO much for bearing with us over the past few days while we get to the bottom of this. Just so we're being extra-safe, it'd be a good idea for everyone to run a quick virus/malware scan on their devices. We're pretty sure things should be clean, but just in case.
We're going to be moving to new chat software very soon, so we'll finally be able to say goodbye to Flashchat and all its annoying bugs...
- Mike, James & Aife
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In all seriousness though thanks!
Abi
Another quick update.
We've been looking into the spamming that's been happening in chat this week. We're pretty confident that we know what's happening now and are working to fix the hole the spammers have found.
Our number one priority is to keep chat safe, so until we can find a way to fix it, we'll be password-protecting all chats over the next week. You'll be able to find the password in the chat thread every day.
This is to prevent the spammer(s) coming back and sending people to random websites again.
We know this isn't ideal and it's not great for newbies who might not know where to find the password. But this is just a temporary fix and we think it'll be enough to stop this from happening.
In the meantime, if you'd to help, we're looking for some volunteers to help us test some different chat software that we could use instead for a short time if everything else fails. More info about that here.
So for the next week, keep an eye on this forum for chat passwords and further updates
Thank you for bearing with us!
James, Mike & Aife
We're not able to provide support on this account. If you need support urgently for any reason, please call 999, go to your nearest A&E or contact Crisis Messenger by texting THEMIX to 85258.
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Hahahahahahaahahahaaahahaa! That would be fun! That should totally be a thing!