The Energon Pub

[Burn]

Seems to be some "Anonymous bumping" happening in this sub-forum.

[Glyph]

Seems to be some "Anonymous bumping" happening in this sub-forum.

Have cleaned up a bunch of spam posts from various bots in that forum. I think the users may already have been removed as I can't find them in the memberlist? (Which has several bugs of its own to complicate that - there's another that I've disapproved a couple of posts from but also can't find)
Johnsonzff
Cookwvt
Cookuei
Cookgwa

There seems to be a (separate?) issue with threads being "bumped by Anonymous" where the last post in the thread is a legit post from a real user, but the content is years old despite the post having a current date. It looks like the previous last post has been wrongly updated with a new date, but the sidebar is failing to link the username to their profile because there's some kind of "anon" user (presumably a missing ID) that it's treating as the author.
Example threads here: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

In each case the last post is genuine but NOT recent and has been messed with by this "bump" function, which I'm not familiar with - I don't see any control to do it, and the idea doesn't make sense as a separate thing anyway since you bump a thread by replying to it.

[Silver Wind]

Same sub-forum from yesterday has been hit with a fresh mini-wave of spam posts.

[Burn]

Same sub-forum from yesterday has been hit with a fresh mini-wave of spam posts.

I don't get why they're targetting that one specific sub-forum, how they're doing it as it's supposed to be restricted to only certain members, and how they're doing it without even being logged in.

[Seibertron]

I can’t view saved drafts

Are you still having this issue? If yes, can you provide me with the URL of the draft you are having trouble accessing? I just need to get the ID of the draft which will be in the URL. Thanks.

[Seibertron]

Same sub-forum from yesterday has been hit with a fresh mini-wave of spam posts.

I don't get why they're targetting that one specific sub-forum, how they're doing it as it's supposed to be restricted to only certain members, and how they're doing it without even being logged in.

I'm assuming it's a glitch in the system from other changes I made last month and the rewriting/fixing of code due to switching from an outdated version of php to a more recent version that phpBB was not written to work with. I just saw these posts from you guys and will have to look into this over the next few days. I'm sorry if this is causing you guys an inconvenience. I'm sure it is annoying. Anonymous bumping is weird.

[Seibertron]

I just disabled topic bumping. Honestly, I didn't even know there was a "link" to bump a topic. Doesn't everyone just make a new post with something like "bump"? This seemed like the easiest solution.

[Seibertron]

I've fine tuned a bunch of stuff with web server, database and code over the past 8 months or so. It's running really good on my end. I'm gearing up to program at least 2 big new features for Seibertron. Is there an area on Seibertron that is problematic to you? Maybe it's a one-off page that doesn't get much traffic?

[Burn]

Just noticed the latest two news posts aren't appearing in the sidebar (even after a forced refresh)

[Emerje]

Just noticed the latest two news posts aren't appearing in the sidebar (even after a forced refresh)

Was just coming to say that, news sidebar isn't refreshing with the latest news.

Emerje

[Seibertron]

Just noticed the latest two news posts aren't appearing in the sidebar (even after a forced refresh)

Was just coming to say that, news sidebar isn't refreshing with the latest news.

Emerje

Thanks for letting me know. I fixed this issue, and this fix resolved a couple other issues that was causing problems in HMW and the site's admin section that I had been unable to figure out. Once I had 3 examples of the problem, I was able to hone in on the issue finally to fix it.

[Silver Wind]

https://www.seibertron.com/caption/optimus-prime-on-his-deathbed/354/

I saw this on the front page and decided to click on it. After scrolling down a bit through the comments, I came across this "Google [Bot]" having spammed "ROFL" (or a garbled variant thereof) on September 5, 2025. I tried clicking on the user name to see where else it had struck, but the page returns an error stating that the user name has an invalid format (owing to the brackets).

[Seibertron]

https://www.seibertron.com/caption/optimus-prime-on-his-deathbed/354/

I saw this on the front page and decided to click on it. After scrolling down a bit through the comments, I came across this "Google [Bot]" having spammed "ROFL" (or a garbled variant thereof) on September 5, 2025. I tried clicking on the user name to see where else it had struck, but the page returns an error stating that the user name has an invalid format (owing to the brackets).

Wow, thank you for sharing that weird problem, Silver Wind. This was a weird one that took me about an hour to resolve. At some point, bot accounts in phpbb, many of which have been here since this version of phpbb was launched back in 2007, were assigned normal user permissions because they had the wrong account types. Apparently malicious bots have figured out how to spoof the legit bot accounts. Since bot accounts are handled a little differently in phpBB, this enabled spoofed accounts to access other areas where the malicious bots try to "hack" code. If you looked at the pattern of posts it was making, it started out with a legitimate post of "rofl" which progressed into "rofl" followed by random characters as it attempted to probe what was acceptable as it presumably tried to hack my code.

I updated all bot accounts to have the correct account types and deleted the posts from Google [Bot].

If any of you see anything like this on the site, please immediately inform me so that I can resolve the problem.