Hangin's too good fer 'em!
More spam problems at Hawgleg
March 5, 2007 -- Houston, Texas

Dang blast it!  Just when we slapped down more security to keep them varmints out, them dang blasted spammers make an even bigger nuisance of themselves!

It just came to our attention this weekend that some moron used a Yahoo mail account to validate his account info and set up a user name at the Hawgleg forums, only to abuse our account and use it to spam people who are registered with us.

“If it was up to us, we’d string them polecats up and watch ‘em dance,” said Gutshot co-creator Mike Mitchell.  “Honestly, this bozo has affected business and delayed shipments.  Instead of packaging three books to ship out in the morning, I’m up past midnight filing a report with Yahoo, notifying the public and trying to configure the server to block his IP address.”

The user name was sent from a user identifying himself as kevin01. We're not going to identify the full name he used because a quick Google search reveals that there is a real person with that name, and he's actually a fairly famous soccer player from Denmark.

"We doubt that a Danish soccer player is spamming everyone," said Hawgleg Posse member Paul Mauer. "So we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt and not plaster Wanted posters with his name on it all over cyberspace."

Mitchell, who was getting his dander up and beginning to sound a LOT like Ole Doc Murphy, said the delays would be for one day only and he would catch up on everything and have the books shipped out Tuesday morning.

Mitchell also wanted to assure everyone that if you did receive a spam e-mail, the spammers did NOT get your e-mail address.  The forum software does not expose your address at any time -- the sender never sees it because the address is stored in our database and is handled directly by our mail server.

“Unless you responded to the e-mail, you should be fine.  Also, please rest assured that we’re on top of this and are doing everything we can to ensure that this doesn’t happen again,” Mitchell said.

If this happens one more time, the current automatic validation system will be placed on hold and all forum applicants will be screened manually.

“I’d hate to do that,” he said. “But we will if we have to.  In the meantime, if you’re worried about getting spam like this, you can go to your Hawgleg member profile and turn off your ‘allow e-mail’ option.”

UPDATE 3/7/2007: We received the following notification from Yahoo regarding this matter: "In this particular case, we have taken appropriate action against the Yahoo! account in question that was reported for fraudulent activities, as per our Terms of Service (TOS)." They wouldn't go into any more detail, but it appears that, at the very least, they canceled his account.  It's better'n nothing... but we still have some rope ready, just in case...

UPDATE 5/14/2007: Kevin01 rears his ugly head again, and once more spams the people in our forum. We're still pretty sure this is done with a "robot," so we will be increasing security measures again.  It will probably take a week to figure out how to install the new security package, so until that time, we have temporarily turned off the feature which allows members to send e-mail to each other.