Good morning,

One account vanished from our forum with all the posts that ever made with the profile and we couldn't find what happened. The user didn't delete himself, we didn't delete him, there is no trace so far of what happened, but every proof of existence is gone. Only thing that stayed is a phantom topic under the name Vendég (Guest in hungarian) that he opened months ago and got one answer, but when we open it the topic opening post is gone, just the answer is there from our admin.

How can we find what happened and restore the users account? Is there anyone who experienced something like this? Many posts are gone and obviously it's very upsetting because we don't know why and who is going to be the next.

Thank you in advance for any help!

Hello @Molly-Rose Kiss

I think I have an explanation for this "strange" disappearance...

In the beginning of the month, the service Forumotion has seen a significant wave of spam. Thousands forums have been impacted. The spammer was posting one or two messages in Russian.

The team intervened and we performed an intense cleanup to remove the accounts and messages from this spammer.
In particular, we have blacklisted a large number of disposable and temporary email services. These are the services used by the spammer to get thousands of emails and spam us.

So your issue about this deleted member could be due to this cleanup. To solve the problem, it is necessary to make a back-up of the forum by inserting only the deleted members and content. (Please read more about it in this tutorial! )

Then change please the email address of this member so that it is not deleted again. (Otherwise our anti-spam system will repeat the deletion.)

I hope this will solve your problem.

Best regards

Thank you for your quick help, we will try to do the back-up and asking all our members to check-on the e-mail adresses and using a real one not a fake.

Just one more question: "we have blacklisted a large number of disposable and free email services." - where can I find which e-mail services are blacklisted? For example most of the people have gmail address and almost noone has paid e-mail address. In our forum most of the people have more than one account and in the admin panel we can write the same, existing e-mail address to all the accounts for the same user, is that better than a "fake e-mail address"?

Thanks again!

The safe ones should be Hotmail, Live, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail

But maybe @Luzz can list the ones not to use

Molly-Rose Kiss wrote:In our forum most of the people have more than one account and in the admin panel we can write the same, existing e-mail address to all the accounts for the same user, is that better than a "fake e-mail address"?

Thanks again!

It is not advised to have more then one account with the same Email address and making a account will not let you use the same Email address more then once.

My advice would to ask your members for a new Email address they have made so you can change it your self this will also help stop account hacking.

Yes, thank you @APE for your intervention.

I was indeed not precise enough in my answer. The problematic emails are of course not the free ones, and you can be sure that there are no problems with Gmail, for examlle. The protection concerns disposable and temporary emails ( this kind of emails is offered by throwaway email services that allow to create very quickly a temporary address which will be destructed after a certain time).

Hello @Molly-Rose Kiss Is this problem now solved ?
If yes Please scroll to the top of this topic and press the Mark Solved button found on the left hand side so we can close the topic.

Thank you.

Ape.