ZDoom

It showed this the first time I logged in

This is getting alarmingly common; I get it on occasion and a number of other users have had it as well.

Happened to me on the Skulltag forums yesterday.

(Thanks for deleting my logins, Adobe Flash Update, you POS.)

It's never happened to me, but I think it's a safe bet it's not a forum bug.

it is most probably spambots attempting to brute force their way into existing users' accounts, nor is it unique to zdoom.org. Your best defense is to make sure you have a good password that isn't straight out of a dictionary.

My password is long and difficult, I don't think a bot will randomly guess it...

one thing strikes me as odd - they don't know my username yet, are the bots guessing random user names and passwords? Why not just click the login thing themselves and try all day?

Also, why bother trying to hack accounts on a zdoom forum anyway? It's not like we have our bank accounts tied to our profiles.

It's reasonable that bots could easily just read through the forum, and pick up usernames from posts.

cq75 wrote:Also, why bother trying to hack accounts on a zdoom forum anyway? It's not like we have our bank accounts tied to our profiles.

Perhaps, they think spam posted by a legitimate user would get more hits than spam posted by some new user.

InsanityBringer wrote:It's reasonable that bots could easily just read through the forum, and pick up usernames from posts.

Most likely.

randy wrote:Perhaps, they think spam posted by a legitimate user would get more hits than spam posted by some new user.

With thanks to the familiarity of the user in general. In fact, the very fact that even if they get in, they're completely bypassing the CAPTCHA checks in the first place. If they're brute-forcing the users, isn't that illegal?