Spam on Proboards Forum - any way to stop it?

[1990mustang]

Forum URL: northernponyclub.proboards.com

Hi all,

Got a message from a Forum member at the weekend that read:

"Not sure if the pro boards northern pony forum has been hacked or not, but I got a couple of notifications that my post had been liked and replied to.

When I clicked on the link it came up saying I had won a free app and a pop window opened for the iTunes Store. The northern pony site was then redirected to the Apple Store.

I could only get on the forum by using the original link you posted on the Facebook page."

Had a look on the Forum (no problems for me), and posted and asked anyone else if they'd had problems, but no-one had. However, got another message today:

"Getting spammed to kingdom come on the NPC forum mate. At least it's games rather that porn."

Can't give any more details than that at the moment as I'm waiting for a call from the second member, but I've got to hold my hands up and admit I have no idea about this side of things. Is there a way to stop it? How is it likely to have happened? Is there anything I can do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Any advice is greatly appreciated, and I'll post if I get any more info from the second guy.

Thanks,

Anth.

[Scott]

1990mustang

We had some 'misbehaving' ads over the weekend that would automatically redirect a member/user to another site or in this case the app store. We have been working to remove these ads from rotation.

Ad-redirects are not spamming in this scenario. Ads on the free ProBoards forums are normal, however ads that automatically redirect the user elsewhere are not sanctioned by us even though now and again some slip by.

If you or your members do experience this again, please use our ad scanning tool (read more about it here). By using this tool, it will capture the information we need to identify the misbehaving ad so we can quickly get it removed.

[1990mustang]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! Spoke to the other forum member and he told a similar story to the first - went to the home page, had a notification on the Profile button, clicked on it and a popup appeared for game downloads. Tried going to the page the notification was about directly, not through profile, and the popups appeared again. Could this be related to the 'misbehaving' ads?

[Scott]

Apr 12, 2016 9:12:31 GMT -8 1990mustang said:

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! Spoke to the other forum member and he told a similar story to the first - went to the home page, had a notification on the Profile button, clicked on it and a popup appeared for game downloads. Tried going to the page the notification was about directly, not through profile, and the popups appeared again. Could this be related to the 'misbehaving' ads?

Yes, because ads appear while viewing a profile page.