I'm wondering if anyone has been recieving advertisements for LCPDFR clans through email lately.

I've gotten 3 so far and the lists of recipients are huge, and what they all have in common is the fact they're LCPDFR clans. To be honest I'm wondering how they got my email...

 

Email #1:

 

Email #2:

After this, I asked how he got my email:

Then I asked him to elaborate:

 

Email #3:

 

All three emails contained 39 recipients (however there were a few different ones)

 

Has anyone recieved these same emails or ones that are similiar?

It seems quite suspicious to me, plus the fact that 2 of the senders never responded when I asked about it.

 

I also want to point out that some of the email addresses match members of this forum (so obviously some have recieved it other than me)

 

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by Chamimnya

First, make sure you haven't typed your email anywhere on the internet, more specifically here, or some other modding site. Did you put it in your signature, etc. To answer your question, I have not received any emails like this and only staff and the individual member has access to email-adresses. 

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by ineseri

Wow. That's really disappointing. It's groups / people like that that give the rest of us a bad reputation and cause all sorts of trouble.

 

I find it interesting that both of those emails advertising for different clans are worded in a similar fashion.

I get them thought enjin allot

If you make mods, they probably got it off the PayPal email section.

I haven't gotten any, but I'm not really worried if I do - disposable emails. I've got at least one for most sites - on those that allow legitimate alternative accounts, usually two in case I lose a login or am on a public computer.

Plus, if you'll look at the top line of the email body (most information redacted for privacy concerns)

That's all I have to do to block it.

Edit: Yes, I'm more than well aware that I didn't redact my disposable addresses, again, not too worried about them being public. Worst case scenario, spambot gets one and I easily block it.

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by EvilJackCarver

I haven't gotten any emails

I haven't gotten any emails

 

That's good and keep it as is to. I hate spam

Feel free to forward any of these e-mails to jay (at) g17media.com. A good effort will be made in denying their access to the site.

 

I'm going to work on securing PayPal donation addresses a bit, as that's the only way someone would be able to get your e-mail address from the site.

I have received two on my email address that I do not use on this site. I am quite disappointed that my email address was taken from a website, where I thought it was private, and used in this way. Again I do not believe it was from lcpdfr they got my email address from

Hi guys, I ran some tests on various pages from the LCPDFR forums; these included forum threads, profiles and downloads.

The test I ran only pulled emails from the download pages for mods. And even then only pulled 1 person's email address (the mod author, if they had the donate function on)

 

In short, LCPDFR has your email addresses covered pretty damn well.

 

Other forums or websites may not be as protected or safe, and running a simple script can have someone pull lots of email addresses quickly. My advice to you all is have an email address separate to any of your day to day activity. Essentially like a "direct all potential spam here"

 

You can (if you so choose) have certain domains like LCPDFR.com forward emails then from the "spam only" email, to your personal ones. But this is mostly a waste of time.

Set up spam filters, mark things as spam and the filters learn to help protect you from it.

 

Feel free to forward any of these e-mails to jay (at) g17media.com. A good effort will be made in denying their access to the site.

 

I'm going to work on securing PayPal donation addresses a bit, as that's the only way someone would be able to get your e-mail address from the site.

Jay, I found 3 places where a mod author's email is displayed, but it is all from the paypal donate button alone. I'm glad to hear you are working on it :)

PS. I ran my tests locally by downloading the website page's source. Maybe it would be beneficial to block access to the inspect element and view source features? 

I get them thought enjin allot

 

I wonder if these spam emails happen through Enjin then. I know there are alot of random start up clans that use Enjin for their website, and everything anyone does on Enjin is linked to their profiles there.

 

Looking at the original post, I see that one of those emails is for a group using Enjin. The other one's website is using a .tk domain which I'm honestly not familiar with. Google says that .tk domains are just generic free domains so, I guess my theory that it's tied to Enjin somehow isn't correct.

 

I find it even more unfortunate that the group using the .tk domain, Liberty County DPS, has directly plaigarised a signifigant amount of material from my community. Almost their entire website is a direct copy / paste job from mine. These are definitely the type of people that give role play communities a bad reputation, and are the reason that the clan forums and the group system here on LCPDFR had to be disabled. I don't think I'll ever understand why theft of various types is so apparently rampant in the GTA world. But, it does explain why so many "clans" seem to start up and shut down overnight... It's hard to be succesful when your leadership has no ethics or commitment.

 

If anyone's emails are being retrived thourgh LCPDFR.com, I'm sure the staff will find and close those loopholes. I see that Jay and Luke are already looking into it, so thanks to them and the rest of the LCPDFR team.

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by johnclark1102

PS. I ran my tests locally by downloading the website page's source. Maybe it would be beneficial to block access to the inspect element and view source features?

You can't. All "view source" does is show you the data your browser has already received. Given that the server's already sending the information, viewing source could only be blocked at the client side, which means you'd have to ask the browser to do it and hope it honors the request (not likely to happen, and even if it did, a user could just use a different browser to view the source). I could pretty easily write my own HTTP fetcher to get the page's source code; rendering HTML is hard, but using basic HTTP is really easy.

I've never received an email like this, but then again, I don't display my personal email all Willy-nilly.

I've never received an email like this, but then again, I don't display my personal email all Willy-nilly.

Nor do I but I still got them.

Just an update:

The first sender finally emailed back.

 

 

If anyone is familiar with torontovirtual.net, it was the site of a police clan but is now the home of the GPS script/MDC. To use it, you must register on their site. Now here's the thing: it says specifically on the register page:

"By entering your name, you are being added to the computer database, and your email address is only used to contact you."

 

And there's no way to delete your account on the site.

 

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EDIT: I tried contacting "R. Bruce" on his clan TS3 server, however got banned for going AFK.

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by Chamimnya

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Edited August 2, 201510 yr by AlconH

Even if this was a batch e-mail, it is extremely irresponsible to do a batch e-mail by including everyone in the To: field.

This lets everyone see each other's e-mail addresses.

 

Additonally, I'll investigate our policy on allowing links to site that do this. There should be (like on LCPDFR.com) an option to opt-out of advertising e-mails -- we never sell your e-mail and we only send messages about new releases or community updates (we've send around 3 of these in the history of our site).

That would just steer me away from them even more. Stupid thing to do and very invading. 

Hello, after reviewing this thread, I will be making changes to my mass email system so that not everyone's email address is in together. My mass email system was just quickly thrown together to get it working, then not really looked at since then. Again I am sorry to everyone who recieved spam mail due to my site.

Hello, after reviewing this thread, I will be making changes to my mass email system so that not everyone's email address is in together. My mass email system was just quickly thrown together to get it working, then not really looked at since then. Again I am sorry to everyone who recieved spam mail due to my site.

 

Wait a second.

 

What do you mean by your "mass email system"? Does this mean you're intentionally sending spam to everyone who has registered?

Edited April 14, 201412 yr by Chamimnya