Important Notice - Security Breach

Not sending a mass e-mail to the 1,000,000+ members was my decision. Contrary to many of the assumptions made in this thread, the decision was NOT made because we don't care about our members and don't want to create more support related questions/work. The entire decision was based on technical challenges.

Android Forums previously leveraged E-Mail in many ways, including registration verification and instant e-mail notifications. As the site grew exponentially, AF was sending out thousands and thousands of E-Mails every hour, and mail servers began to assume our site was sending out spam. After 6 months of dealing with mail serving blacklists that created humongous problems, we de-prioritized E-Mail so the site could function more smoothly.

A one-off E-Mail to 1,000,000+ users could have an incredibly negative impact on the site, instantly sucking us back into a hole that took quite awhile to climb out of. We've been researching solutions for our E-Mail woes but I can assure you, it's much easier said than done. It's much more complicated than writing an E-Mail, uploading the E-Mail addresses, and pushing a button. The potential consequences are numerous and far reaching.

Again, I want to reiterate that this was my personal decision. Please don't point the fingers at our staff of Admins, Mods, and Guides- they've brought these matters to my attention swiftly and have the interest of AF members at the absolute top of their priority list. In fact, they deserve a huge round of a applause at the amazing job they've done and continue to do.

If you'd prefer to boo, then those boos should be directed at me, but hopefully I've alleviated at least some of your concerns as to the reason we can't currently fulfill your requests. We'll continue to look for opportunities to improve AF and this E-Mail deficiency is certainly a sore spot for us. As always, you're criticisms and suggestions are welcomed and appreciated- they help us improve which is our everlasting goal.

Thanks to everyone for sticking with us through thick and thin!

kbimler said:

Rob,

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what went into your decision to not send out email messages. I understand the ramifications of sending out a million email messages could have caused. It would have just been helpful to have know about this security issue less than 16 days after it happened, and then only because I happened to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (something I rarely ever do).

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For two weeks there was a red banner at the top of every page alerting users to this issue. I didn't realize it was gone.

And thanks Rob, that makes sense about the email blast.

kbimler said:

Reading through the thread I got the impression that there was a much larger notification initially. I just probably had not been on the forums here for at least a month, probably even longer.

I'm not too concerned about it. The worst thing that was going to get hacked by this security issue was a number of other forums that I visit that may have had the same password (don't even know for sure if they did).

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It was mainly the banner and a few of us that linked to it in our signature.