With the release of the final book only days away, Harry Potter Forums has become a target of people posting potential spoilers on our site. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to prevent the initial posting of the spoilers. However, our Moderator Team is dedicated to the swift removal of such content. If you are concerned about seeing potential spoilers, I recommend that you do not visit this website until after you have read the book. Additionally, there are many other places online where you could be subject to such spoilers. Protect yourself however you think you should.
Last night, our site was under an organized attack by a group of individuals posting potential spoilers, spam, and other innappropriate content. The dedicated staff members of the site have removed all of this offending content. In order to combat the attack, we were forced to disable the forums for a short period of time while I setup some tools for members to report bad posts and for the Moderator Team to more efficiently remove innappropriate posts. I would like to thank the Moderator Team for their hard work removing the offending content, and I would like to thank you, our members, for your patience in dealing with these temporary problems.
After this initial attack was repelled, the same group of individuals hacked the website and took over control of the forums. Please disregard any email messages you have received from this website in the last 24 hours. These emails were sent by malicious users after our website was hacked. The emails contained potential spoilers for Book 7 and should be considered false. We apologize for any confusion or problems this may have caused.
For a short period of time, registration for new members will be disabled in order to prevent another attack from occuring soon. Registration will be enabled within 24 hours once we are more secure against spoiler/spam attacks. Thank you for your patience with any of these inconveniences while we protect our community. _________________
As an FYI, I received approximately 75 replies to the malicious email sent last night. Below is the reply I sent to each and every person that replied:
Hello,
Last night our website was taken over by hackers. One of the first things they did was send a mass email to all registered website members. The email you received with a subject of "Potterforums shutting down due to AIDS" was sent by the hackers that took control of our website. The spoiler content in the email should be considered false. Please disregard this message. We apologize for all the problems over the last 24 hours, but we are doing our best to resolve the issues.
Currently, the website is back up and running. We hope that you are able to understand the circumstances that caused this email to be sent. Again, we apologize for you receiving this email. For more information regarding what has occurred on our website over the past 24 hours, please visit this announcement:
Please note that this is the standard response that is being sent to all members that replied to the malicious email. If you have any questions that were not answered in the announcement above, please post in the forums and we will provide information as quickly as we can.
Thank you for being a member of our HP community. We hope that you are able to forgive us for this extremely unfortunate situation.
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