There appears to be some kind of bot attack on our site.

Something that caught my eye: Steven is my name, and "Candace" is my wife's name.

I have nothing at all to do with this "Faye" account.

According to Google translate the first was in Swedish and was a recap of a soccer match between Chelsea and Bayern Munich.

I thought the mods had to approve all new users to the site. At least I seem to remember it being that way.

Seems to be appearing in different languages as well, which is a bit odd.

..........plus, the Chelsea v Bayern Munich fixture that appeared first of all would appear to be from 2012 (the last time they played in that competition), so they aren't exactly up to date foootball reports either!

I await a report on the Ipswich Town UEFA cup win from 1981 with interest........

Looks like Swedish Chef joined the forums.

The offending messages are gone (for now)

These are typically used to build the search rankings for web sites. The Google algorithm looks at who you link to (and their status) and who links to you.

If they reappear, ignore them, and we will delete them, and possibly repeat, repeat...

Randy

The text was just random word associations. It was definitely not Swedish. I would recognize that immediately.

Maybe the moderators haven't had time yet to deal with this, but there is more 'Bot' stuff in the Railfanning and Classified sections. Sad that this forum got attacked-

Next time report the post as spam by clicking the red exclamation mark (under every post.)

Should go without saying, don’t get curious and click on any links in those posts.

Might I add... delete the user account. I did a quick check and it’s still there.

Also, if this version of phpBB runs on PHP version 5.x, it is advisable to upgrade to the latest version of phpBB, 3.2 I think, and enable PHP 7.2. The older versions of PHP have security vulnerabilities.

I just deleted that account and the offending threads.

We get several new user registration requests every day. Most are blatant bots with nonsensical user names. I don't approve any of them. I leave that up to Randy and Doug but I do get the emails too.