WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

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Drugwash
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WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 06:28

I'm not sure what's going on here.
I got notification of a private message in my inbox (WHEN are you gonna allow mail.com as a valid e-mail provider so I could finally delete my damn AOL account?)
I logged into the board and saw (1) in the Private messages area at the top.
I opened the Private messages and there was NO new/unread message. The Notifications area said it was from Mindygob. No posts/comments from that user were found on a subsequent search.

My question is, as the title says: who and why would intrude and delete PRIVATE messages, even if they would be spam/virus/whatever? It's private, period. A warning - if really necessary - should suffice; the user would be the final judge. Maybe they want to pursue the issue, harvest virii, whatever. Or are we, the users, so stupid that we need babysitting…? And I'm dead serious about this: leave private stuff alone!
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Nextron
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 07:06

Every day many new accounts are registered with the sole purpose of spamming. Either by creating spam topics, off-topic threads with spam in the signature or by sending private messages. When those new accounts are caught spamming, thereby breaching the terms of service, they are banned and all and any content they introduced is removed entirely. This indeed results in content directed at you from disappearing as well.
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 07:29

Which means any possibility of analyzing and possibly preventing further breaching is lost as well.
I'm a curious person and sometimes I may want to pursue such issue. Would it be possible to just attach a (strong) warning to such private messages but leave them intact so that the recipient would be made aware but they would still have the final decision whether to process the information or delete it? You know: one's garbage may be someone else's treasure.
And in my humble opinion, distributing whatever kind of information through private or public channels in mass is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it's done in a foreign language that board authorities may not master. It's a big, big world out there…

Thank you for replying, Nextron.
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nnnik
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 08:04

No there is no such chance. This would involve heavy changes in the way the board works - changes we currently lack the means to do.
Also we are responsible for the content that is shared on our platform. And as such we need to delete this content that may potentially be harmful.

Actually the means to analyze it is not lost because the data is retained - it's just that only a selected few administrtors can open them.
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 08:22

Heavy changes, nnnik??? Like attaching a "user was marked as spammer, exercise caution" to the message? Yeah, I can see that could be a problem for platforms that lack a broad vision and/or respect for privacy.
Who decides what is harmful and for who? Shouldn't it be me, the user, to decide that, if it's a PRIVATE message? Do I really have to emphasize the word PRIVATE? Why would an administrator read MY private message and analyze it? If I find it "potentially harmful" as you put it, I'd report it. Otherwise, please DO RESPECT PRIVACY. Even if I'm .001% of the userbase that realy cares about that.
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nnnik
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 10:04

We don't get the content of the private messages - just the posts remain.
And yeah it would require quite a few changes to a few plugins of the phpBB forum software.
It is decidedly so that every message that was send out by a spam bot is harmful.
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tank
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 13:45

I have many other priorities on this forum right now like completing the updates to the themes. You have got to be the only person on the entire internet that WANTS to read SPAM. We will continue to delete it indiscriminately. I do make code changes to outright block certain programatically identifiable SPAM. When we banhammer someone it kills all that users content including private messages. No one is reading your messages. per the forum TOS our administrators reserve the right to remove content as we see fit. There are perfectly viable options for products out there if you want to get and read SPAM. I do not intend to be one of them
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jeeswg
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 14:48

Thanks for mentioning this Drugwash, I experienced the same thing and was feeling the same way. I'm satisfied with the current situation, but it's a difficult balance.
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 18:51

Automated systems may sometimes fail, marking as spam content that is perfectly legitimate. AOL at some point started to mark all MSFN board e-mail notifications as spam despite my unspamming each and every one of them for days, which eventually made me disable the spam "protection" completely - that is, "don't mess with my messages, I'll be the judge of what is and is not spam". And then I switched registration address to mail.com, over at MSFN, and now I'm getting all those notifications just fine. Thing that I would like to do here too.

That's about e-mail providers but automation - isn't it ironic to speak about automation failure here…? - may fail in any system, including this board's. What if one misses a legitimate and important message by accident, due to such failure? You say no human is reading those messages so nobody would know what's actually lost - except for the sender. Wordpress' Akismet also regularly throws legitimate messages from known users into Spam, but they have the decency to leave those messages there so the user could manually analyze and assess whether they really are unwanted. And no, I don't particularly care about reading spam, but certain information extracted from such messages could be of use in other contexts (forensic analysis).

So basically what I'd like - if/when other more important work is finished - is place a big red banner reading "SPAM" on such messages but leave them there for the user to decide. If only to eliminate the bad "WTF!?" sensation when you log in upon getting the notification e-mail only to find nothing in the inbox.
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gregster
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

23 Oct 2018, 19:51

I think, not deleting spam messages could heavily encourage spammers - and that is, from my experience (and also what experts say), something you don't want to do... at least not in a forum that has completely different objectives and priorities than facilitating communication with spammers.
The possibility that a spammer mixes in really important messages to you while they are spamming to all others seems only theoretical. Even if the spammer does, the spammer is the only one to blame then. I am sure, it would take a special kind of genius to send really important messages this way because that's what people do when they are sending important personal stuff :wtf: , don't they?

Like tank alluded to, there are much better ways if you intend to study spammer behaviour and do forensic analysis... I understand that this topic can be wildly interesting but as you probably know, most people (especially on the internet) are stupid. While I would estimate that the average AHK forum user is less stupid than the average internet user, I would support the goal to protect our users from as much spam as possible (private or public), even if that means that some forum members will miss some unbelievable business opportunities, a decent chat with a scammer/spammer or even crucial information about the best diet or latest penis enlargement drugs.
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 04:55

Have some fun:
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jNizM
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 06:55

The automatic deletion of spam & phishing mails when banning spam users is a security feature for the user, so that he does not accidentally click on a spam or phishing link and pull something onto his PC. Like a virus, trojaner, ransomware or other dangerous stuff.
It should be the task of a forum administrator to protect his users from such dangers on his board. So it is justified from my point of view that these e-mails are deleted automatically when they are banned.
Last edited by jNizM on 25 Oct 2018, 08:06, edited 1 time in total.
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nnnik
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 07:33

thats not spam mail he responded to but phishing mail.
Spam bots log in once and post exactly once and potentially even send out a few automated messages.
After they log out they never log in again.

The only time where they log in again is the type that makes a seemingly valid post that is used to pass our spam filter.
These bots then change the post at a later date to insert links.

Spam on this forum has the intention to increase the ranking of specific websites by sharing their links on a lot of websites.
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tank
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 09:12

I am going to make this blunt and simple. There is no case in which i intend to alter the code to leave spam on the server, period. on this i will not budge
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 10:56

Well then, at least make it so that notifications for such deleted messages would not be sent to users' e-mail so they would not be bothered to log in for nothing. And also make sure the top bar doesn't show a fake count for Notifications and Private messages either in such case, as it currently does.
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nnnik
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 11:11

Yes of course we will start the planning for a time machine so that we can keep the notification e-Mails from being send after we identified that said user is a spammer.
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 11:33

I was hoping for a constructive idea, such as delay notifications from new users and/or messages bearing uncertain content until certified as legit, but lately nobody seems to want to do something really positive and useful. Mockery is much easier. :(
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Nextron
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

25 Oct 2018, 11:52

I'm not sure whether phpBB supports automatic usersgroup advancement based on post count. If it does, new users could start in a 'new user' group which doesn't allow direct messages, signatures or [url]/[img] tags, until they reach 3 posts or something. That's not much of a barrier for regular users, but one that's not frequently exceeded by spammers.
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tidbit
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

26 Oct 2018, 17:30

Drugwash wrote:
25 Oct 2018, 11:33
I was hoping for a constructive idea, such as delay notifications from new users and/or messages bearing uncertain content until certified as legit, but lately nobody seems to want to do something really positive and useful. Mockery is much easier. :(
it's a good idea, but if you can't tell, our forums recently "broke" a bit. and there's really only like 2-3 people with that kind of server access needed for such a mod, and they're all busy with life. Writing, testing, installing such an addon before we're even fixed and back in a stable platform, is probably not priority especially since only a couple people care (most people are probably like "oh, not here? must have been spam. ok").

also, phpbb sucks. I'll never pass up a chance to bash it :P writing crap for it is annoyingly complex and dumb.

easiest solution: disable notifications and just check for a number on the PM icon when you login. nothing? no messages, otherwise messages
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Drugwash
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Re: WHO and WHY deletes PRIVATE messages?

27 Oct 2018, 01:45

@ tidbit: For me, things are a bit more complicated because of the 15kB/s download limit. While I may be able to check e-mails from time to time (lately even once a month) by using a POP3/IMAP application, opening a browser and logging into the board while other applications use the connection may prove very hard or even impossible. And if I do log in following a PM notification - which I consider high priority - and find nothing there, it pisses me off because my thinking - as opposed to what you said about "most people" - is not "it must've been spam" but rather "sender must've deleted their message because I didn't read & reply soon enough". And I get sad beyond the sadness that real life throws at me. Besides, as mentioned above the numbers were still there when I logged in although there was nothing in inbox so that's not a valid solution (I use the alternative theme).

I understand this issue (and myself) are low priority and it wouldn't have been so much fuss if someone "up there" had said "we'll look into this as soon as possible" and mean it. Unfortunately I'm not at all knowledgeable in web languages and have no idea how phpBB's code looks like, otherwise I would've looked into it myself and maybe created/provided a solution already.

@ Nextron: Well, that is a good and constructive idea. Thank you. Hopefully it can be implemented, it could ease the spam sorting task a bit.
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