What's happening with profile posts in Forums?

[astyle]

Just today, I made a conversation post on my profile on the Forums... I'm logged in. But...

I probably shouldn't need mod approval for my own profile post... or did we have a problem with too many people making politically motivated (and irrelevant to FreeBSD) profile posts?

In fact, the feed of profile posts has disappeared from the forums.freebsd.org page... I noticed that yesterday.

 

[SirDice]

We've had some older accounts, with dozens of good posts, suddenly posting spam. Those accounts appeared to have been hijacked. Your profile post looked extremely dodgy. To err on the safe side I had put your account on "watched/moderated". It's been taken off now.

 

[T-Daemon]

We've had some older accounts, with dozens of good posts, suddenly posting spam. Those accounts appeared to have been hijacked.

If a user account is hijacked, presumably due to a weak account password, and a new password is set, making the account inaccessible to the account creator, how should a legitimate forum user proceed to reclaim the account?

Should the "Contact us" page used or contacted by other means? And how can the contacting person prove that they are the original creator of the account?

 

[SirDice]

Should the "Contact us" page used or contacted by other means?

Email to forum-admins@ yes.

And how can the contacting person prove that they are the original creator of the account?

That's a very good question. We'll figure something out.

Best is not to get your account hijacked of course. Enabling 2FA will certainly help.

 

[astyle]

We've had some older accounts, with dozens of good posts, suddenly posting spam. Those accounts appeared to have been hijacked. Your profile post looked extremely dodgy. To err on the safe side I had put your account on "watched/moderated". It's been taken off now.

Pheww, thanks for the explanation!

Yeah, the Plaid API is mostly a US-centered thing. I've been interested in using finance/gnucash, but it's using an older standard that doesn't work any more in US... I had to do some research outside of Open Source world and make some sense of what's going on in the world of personal money management. My personal priorities have shifted over time... The Plaid API's do look like using a bit of Python will help me slurp up my own info into a FreeBSD-based device without giving up too much personal info in return - if I'm willing to put in the work on making it work right.

Well, I have seen some people's posts get too political/offtopic, so yeah, I personally do see that as abuse of profile posts.

No, my account has not been hijacked (best I can tell), that was my own post. I hope this post explains what I did...