Trouble with Posting Photos & Server Error in For Sale Section

ww1czechlegion

ww1czechlegion

Well-known member
Hello,

I inadvertently added 4-duplicate listing in the Pickelhaubes "For Sale" Section. (Please remove the duplicate listings.)

I kept getting "Server Error" messages at the top of the screen when I was trying to do the posting. And I did not realize that the system was actually taking my posting, since it said there was a "server error" and to try again.

I am wondering why the photos do not show up as they used to, but instead they must be clicked upon to open them. What happened/What changed here with the photo posting?

Thanks,

Alan
 
I will remove those Alan. I am also wondering why we now have to click on these links with no photos being shown like before. I emailed Joel on Monday and again today but no reply as yet. Two of our members including Amy have been locked of the forum. The system asked for password, it didn’t work and they were blocked for having tried to log in too many times. Something definitely is wrong here and we need Joel to fix it.
 
I have just learned from my son Logan that the forum was updated recently so this has produced our problems. It was down on Sunday. He is going to contact Joel on Facebook and let him know what is going on.
 
Brian, as you know I am also a member on our Dutch motorcycle forum which also uses Xenforo, that was updated also.
The exact same problems occur there now. It seems that that update wasn't so succesful unfortunately.
Hopefully these problems will be solved soon!
 
I heard back from Joel and he is working at solving our problems. I appreciate everyone’s patience while we deal with the results of this XenForo update. Thanks for the information Coert.
 
LoraFrancis said:
Regarding the change in the photo posting behavior, it's possible that there have been updates or changes made to the website's platform or settings. This could result in photos needing to be clicked on to open them, rather than displaying directly. To get a more accurate explanation for this change, I suggest contacting the website's support team or checking the website's help/documentation section for any relevant information about recent updates or changes.
Click to expand...

This happened on January 5th of 2022, over a year and four months ago!

May I ask what the point is of what you posted above? The message you posted is not relevant because there have been no problems since over a year and four months ago.
 
b.loree said:
I will be watching posts by this member, there have been no efforts to sell anything here so far. AI Chatbot?…is this the next technological curse we will have to deal with ?
Click to expand...
Yes, it very well may be an AI Chatbot. Why else would "it" or "they" choose to reply to two old threads, both which have not been active for over a year.

Both of these threads have nothing to do with any current problem here with posting photos or with any current problem involving US Customs in Chicago. It seems logically very strange that an actual real person "new member" would choose to make postings here in such a manner, choosing these two old inactive topics to post on.
 
b.loree said:
I will be watching posts by this member, there have been no efforts to sell anything here so far. AI Chatbot?…is this the next technological curse we will have to deal with ?
Click to expand...
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Robots, or Chatbots, in fact the same, use this as reference for posting answers, on various forums.
These robots search the internet for this, and so reply. In the usual manner as we see here.
I do not know this person posting here, but agree with Seagull and Alan on this.
Be carefull Brian.

Regards, Coert.
 
Thanks to you both Alan and Coert, I am aware of AI and the recent warnings for humanity posted by it's creators. However, I naively never expected it to turn up on a collector forum such as this! So obviously, when I miss something like this again , I do need more tech aware members to point this out. I will delete those posts. On a lighter note....both James and Gus have made some weird posts lately.....maybe they have been captured by AI??? o_O o_O
 
Brian, if this is some kind of AI response, randomly aimed at us, it may be no more than an annoyance but you always have to worry that their input on YOUR database contains some variety of bug or hacking tool. I don't know how to protect against that but it certainly is a burgeoning threat that needs better brains than mine to combat.
 
If only the AI were actually intelligent! Imagine an AI bot, that has scoured all the posts in this forum, and also relevant post on German and French forums, and the internet in general, to gather all that Pickelhaube knowledge, and be able to answer a lot if not most of our questions. Wouldn't that be useful?

Alas, the AI seems to be able to have some generic conversation (a great achievement no doubt), but doesn't seem to go further than that. It looks like the ads that are supposed to be tailored by AI to my interests: I never get ads for nice militaria, but if I looked for a pair of pants then for months afterwards I get ads for paints. How many paints does the AI think I need?
 
Lars, a guy can never have too many pairs of pants (!) but if this was just a "drop-in" response to a set of questions posed on this site then, to get that far, the Bot had to go through the whole registration process using believable background information about "themselves" - just like we did when we registered. It is a whole bigger deal than just collecting clicks on advertisements. Maybe Joel will have some insight into it ?
 
On a vaguely related note, I did move the attachment storage a couple of days ago just to free up some space on the primary volume. Everything *should* be okay but as always please do let me know if you experience any issues either uploading or viewing attachments.

seagull said:
Lars, a guy can never have too many pairs of pants (!) but if this was just a "drop-in" response to a set of questions posed on this site then, to get that far, the Bot had to go through the whole registration process using believable background information about "themselves" - just like we did when we registered. It is a whole bigger deal than just collecting clicks on advertisements. Maybe Joel will have some insight into it ?
Click to expand...

As I understand it, humans are typically involved in the registration process. Sometimes it's the spammers themselves, other times they'll present the questions to unwitting users, either as part of a scammy "reward" scheme or in some instances, where a user is infected with a virus they'll be asked to answer the questions (out of context, of course) before continuing to use their PC, for example.

In terms of the actual messages, they definitely look like something ChatGPT would come up with if it were provided the last few messages as contet. I've noticed it tends to give fairly vague answers when it's unsure, i.e. the generic "contact the website's support team".

If I had to guess the idea from the spammer behind the accounts is to post messages over time (with reasonably plausible sounding messages generated by ChatGPT), so as to not arouse suspicion from forums that may monitor new accounts more closely, until they've had some time to 'slip under the radar' so to speak, and then later post spam.

I've also seen spammers do this as a sort of test - if the posts remain up they can assume the forum *probably* doesn't have particularly stringent moderation, so they can assume, fairly safely, that they can post spam without problems.

As strange as it may sound in my experience they tend to actually target smaller forums more, because they're less likely to have such active moderation teams.
 
Thanks Joel for your insight. My thinking is that our best defence is vigilance. To all members, do not hesitate to report any spam or unusual activity here on the forum. These will be looked into.
 
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