I have received the following email which has apparently come through this community. I will paste it below, NOT because I want anyone to think it is genuine, but to expose to Dr. Long that these things are going on and hopefully enable him to delete the membership of the person involved.
This week there has been good news, and bad news. The good news is that we got our email bug fixed, and now you can click on a member's name to get to their profile where you can send them a private email.
The bad news is that some unethical individuals newly join our community only to use this email utility to send ridiculous spam. These spams are primitive get-rich-schemes that are so simple as to insult anyone's intelligence.
You Can Help
Please report these members who send you spam email and we will immediately ban them. You can post their names in this discussion thread. I have already banned mattins11 for sending this spam.
If you have banned Mattins wilson at his/her yahoo address how did he/she manage to send me an email the following day through this site?????
Hi Xander,
Mattins used our email utility (accessible by clicking on your name and going to your Profile). We then banned him from our membership. I will have to check if non-members can still send you email from your Profile. If so, we will correct that this weekend.
For years, our email utility was broken, and we didn't notice. Then recently we fixed it; and ever since our members have been receiving spam emails originating from fraudulant "new members" using our email utility.
Here is my question: should we permanently disable our email utility? I think that it was better before; when all communication was on our public bulletin boards (without private emails).