Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

It also appears that some members received a personal message via this Forum from the above spammer.

Please note that this does not mean that the Forum has been compromised or that the spammer now has your e-mail address. They used the internal Forum mail system to send you a mail which if your profile is set up to receive acknowledgements of personal messages would have been delivered to your e-mail address as if it came from the Handheld Learning Forum.

In the nearly 2 years that we have been running the Forum nothing like this has ever happened however we can take some steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. We can:

1) Approve new memberships at admin level.

This would mean that new members wouldn't get immediate access and we would need to have an e-mail exchange to make sure that new members are genuine, which isn't too friendly!

2)  Disable the personal messaging system

Which means members won't be able to talk to each other directly unless already knowing each others e-mail address. Again not an ideal scenario when the system was intended to be a community for members to communicate.

What do people think?

Hi there

A quick update.

For the time being we've restricted new member registration as mentioned above. This just means that whilst we still very much welcome new members there will be a delay of up to 24 hours before their application is approved.

With regards to sending private messages between members you will need to have reached "Active Member" status before you will be able to private message other members. Active Member status is reached when you have made a successful number of posts on this board. We will be keeping this restriction until we have created a site modification that limits the number of private messages that can be sent in one day.

If you want to avoid getting sent any private messages at all then after you log-in go to this Forum section, select the "profile" button above centre, then enter an * in the ignore list box and make sure that all of the check boxes are unchecked. This way you will not receive any private messages from within the system.

Many thanks