Trust No One.

To draw a line under this one:

• Private messages are exactly that, private - unless of course anyone within that conversation chooses to report part of it to us as staff due to a problem, at which point that component of the conversation is no longer private
• ANY data sent to ANY website can never be 100% guaranteed to be secure/private; if banks can't manage it with all their millions, what chance do we have?
• In the past 24 hours alone, considerable time was spent "behind the scenes" to work out where an attempt to hack into our forum was coming from (Russia, using servers in Germany), and indeed I am happy to show anyone the depths of code that had to be plunged into to work that out, if anyone is in need of insomnia treatment!
• That is one example of the investigative work we do almost daily to PREVENT our forum being over-run and to keep your private messages.... private!
• We as Admin are all here giving of our own free time on a voluntary basis and are not paid, and we are certainly not happy when disparaging remarks are made about our motives on the open forum
  
• Concerns/complaints of this nature should be directed to us to answer privately, or any posts that are offensive/problematic should be reported using the report mechanism. Posting threads of that nature can only be construed as disrupting the peace and harmony of the forum, and will lead to appropriate action being taken.

 

Aw! Go on! We have to!

 

Indeed - over 100 attempts inside 24hrs, IP addresses purporting to be from Hesse, Frankfurt or Switzerland yet dig into the detail of the code and the words Europe/Russia revealed themselves....

Quite what they think they have to gain from us, I have no idea.

 

There hasn't been one night in the past fortnight where at least one Admin member has been banning multiple Spammers from various locations until the early hours of the morning. And then another member of the Team banning even more (35) on one particular day when that member came on GC later in the morning.......try that just before, or just after, Breakfast.

 

@pattie please be assured that YOU are not at any risk from hackers; all information here is encrypted to a huge degree, which is part of the reason why it took so long to discern where these issues were originating.

Indeed, we do not know what their intentions were here because our own protocols caught them time and time again, and given that they were attempting to barge in as members it is highly likely in my mind that they wanted to flood us with spam advertising.

I cannot stress enough that your information is so safe - we take great pride in that fact and in all the years that I can think of there has not been one single breach. Not one.

My point was more that we DO take huge steps to protect your details, your posts and your private messages and we do not take kindly to having posts insinuating that there are things going on 'behind the scenes' that mean your messages are not private.

Nothing in life is 100% guaranteed - in everything we do in life there is a risk involved, even if (as it the case here) that risk is so incredibly small.

We all have a responsibility to ourselves whilst using the internet however, no matter what website you use - don't post your address online, nor your phone number, or indeed photos of your vehicle registration plates, and obviously never disclose any financial information either. If we all do that, and treat any message we send as though it might, could, maybe be seen... then we will have no problem.

Bear in mind - in theory, there is always the risk that our houses could get hit by a meteorite.... but we don't lie in bed worrying about it.

 

@pattie

I'll second that, Pattie, in fact if you take a breath,, GC is more probably one of the most secure of the sites in that all members of the Admin Team take an active manual 24/7 effort to ensure that Hackers/Spammers do not gain entrance to GC. No Hackers/Spammers are therefore able to get through the GC Front Door and they stay on the outside.
However, I doubt if you can say that about Face Book, Twitter, or any other Social Forum you might be a member of, as they have no real measures to stop the stream of information that their members give about their personal life and that of their family and friends. So people wanting to do so can join those Social Forums without any real security checks.
So, hand on heart, pattie, if you think about it, GC vets every person wishing to join, identifies those suspects and either rejects them or bans even before they can get onto the GC Forum which makes GC one of the safest Forums you can be on.
What most members of Face Book, Twitter, etc who usually join without any thought or worries about security, don't realise is that Hackers/Spammers are already on those sites draining every ounce of personal data that is unwittingly, but quite willingly, by members giving out addresses, really personal information that can be use to them.