Ugh! For the second time now, we’ve had a spammer send junk email to about 40 MakeFive user accounts. After the first incident we added features including spam detection and a CAPTCHA to all messaging components of the site. Unfortunately, these spammers will seemingly jump through any hoop in order to ask all of us for dates.

As I’m sure you can understand, we’re all really frustrated about this. The challenge is how we prevent these highly-motivated spammers from ruining the experience for the rest of the community. This seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s actually quite tricky. The more we lock down the system, the harder it makes it for users like you to get the most out of the site.

Today we’ve worked on adding add more restrictions to the messaging functions. For example, you’ll now have to become friends with a user before you’re able to send a personal message to them. This should make it more challenging for people like this to send us all junk messages. We really hope that these changes don’t discourage interaction between real users like you.

In the meantime, we apologize for this incident and will continue to do everything we can to prevent it from happening again. Thanks for your patience!

Eric