Forum Display Name

[Phlier]

Hello,

I was brought to this forum through the acquisition of coticule.be.

All of the posts that I made on coticule.be were brought to this forum successfully, however my posts show my email address instead of a "forum name."

This is completely unacceptable, as I'm sure you know, there are thousands of bots that constantly scrub through internet forums to find email address for spam purposes.

I have been unable to find how to change the displayed name on my forum posts to something other than my email address. Over the past several weeks, I have noticed that the amount of spam I receive on a daily basis has gone up by a factor of TEN. I now know why... this forum has been publicly displaying my email address. I am now getting HUNDREDS of spam emails daily.

PLEASE CHANGE MY DISPLAYED FORUM NAME TO "Phlier" IMMEDIATELY.

I think it is fantastic that Bart's forum lives on, but the manner in which email address became easily viewed by every spam bot in the world is simply not ok.

 

[efsk]

Dirk will change this soon as he's back online. However, the increase in spam since several weeks cannot be caused by this: We've integrated CBE into our forum less than a week ago.
Still: I'm sorry this happened!

 

[dirk]

Hi,

we apologize that there obviously went something wrong with your account during the import. We do not know why this happened, since all the other accounts were imported with the correct usernames as you can see yourself in all threads. In the old CBE forum, your username "FloorPizza" was still there, so the import script should have taken that username as it did with all other users.

The only possibility I can image would be that you would have had in the old CBE forum two different accounts with the same email address, so the import script passes that then. But I am not sure about this.

I changed your username now to Phlier, but we can change it also back to FloorPizza as in the old times, if you want to.

Over the past several weeks, I have noticed that the amount of spam I receive on a daily basis has gone up by a factor of TEN. I now know why... this forum has been publicly displaying my email address. I am now getting HUNDREDS of spam emails daily.

As Richard mentioned it already, it is technically impossible that the reason you get more spam as usual since several weeks now is this import, because the import was done only a few days ago.

Although I understand your fear and emotions, please be cautious with such insinuations.

 

[Phlier]

I appreciate your help, gents, thank you.

However, let's clear something up. Unfortunately, the email address that was displayed is my primary email address. I learned years ago that a disposable email address (one in which you don't care if it gets spammed) is necessary to have a happy online life. For quite a few years now, I have used a disposable email address for forum registrations, shopping, etc. As you can imagine, that address gets tons of spam. However, the email address used back when I registered with coticule.be was my primary, as Bart was considered a close friend.

I used to get one or two spam messages per week at that address. As of today, I'm now receiving 50 per day (yes, I did exagerate with the "hundreds"... that was actually a few days worth at the time I looked at all of my spam). The ONLY thing that has changed was the public display of that address here on the forums. That's a bit too large of a coincidence.

Nonetheless, I'll be "cautious with such insinuations" going forward, if you'll be more careful with personal information. Deal?