[SMF] Uploaded Avatar Problems!

[2poam]

I and my global moderator have experienced the same thing. Our avatars have changed but neither I nor she has made any such change in our profiles. I'd like to know why that is. I do not believe it has anything to do with the theme we are using because our avatars have been working fine with this theme until recently. A little help looking into this would be nice.

[twhiting9275]

Managing and administrating your forum is completely up to you. Take a look through the admin logs, make sure that your password is not easily guessable, make sure that your admin haven't changed things.

[2poam]

We are aware that managing the forum is up to us and we have of course taken precautions accordingly. There is only a moderator log and there is no foreign involvement as far as I can see. On the other hand it is not possible to see changes made in the members personal profiles so I have no way of knowing if this is cause of a bug in the program (because it is obvious there all ready IS a bug since the preview button for posting a reply in the forums is not working) or an intruder in the forum.
For bugs I have found these links
Fetching preview problem and return to this topic problem

All Your SMF Forums Have Been Hacked. Have a Nice Day. | DeveloperSide.NET Blog
both giving suggestions for solutions to the problem I am unable to check or correct. I am only reporting a problem and if your are unable to help then I will look elsewhere. Thank you.

[twhiting9275]

While I appreciate your bringing a potential problem to our attention, again, this is not a software problem, this is a specific forum problem, specifically related to your own forum, and your own passwords.

Your links are to completely unrelated topics.

Firstly, no forums have been hacked.
Secondly, no other forums have reported this issue at all.
Thirdly, this has NOT happened anywhere else.

Password security is your responsibility. Your avatars were changed by yourself, or your own account, NOT through your forum being 'hacked'. It really is quite simple to guess passwords until something comes up that works. Without proper password security, you're screwed.

I've gone through all of the forums, and in no cases have I found any 'changed' avatars, or any indication that there is a problem with the avatar setup. This means that this is specifically related to your forum, one of your admins, or weak passwords. That, nobody can fix, but yourself. If there WAS a problem, I'd happily fix it, but there isn't any indication of a global problem.

[twhiting9275]

On further investigation, it has been found that this IS a software problem, and reported to the software developers. I've moved the thread into the 'reported' forum so that I can keep an eye on it. This is not an SMF problem, rather a multi-forum client problem.

This isn't your forum being 'hacked', this is simply an avatar being added to another user on another forum. My suspicion is that it has to do with uploaded avatars only, but I can't speculate too much on that. I'm actually rather surprised that it hasn't come out before.

[twhiting9275]

Ok, I've talked with the software developer, and they're basically blowing this one off with a typical "we do not support uploaded avatars" statement. Unfortunately, not really much I can do about that.

What I CAN do is this:
Since this appears to only affect uploaded avatars, then I will store them on the local server so that you may use them on your forum. You will need to provide me with a URL I can download the avatar from, and then you'll need to look around for it in the avatar section. The best I can do is put it in the custom avatar section.

Alternatively, you can upload it to an image sharing service, and use THAT, telling SMF to use remotely hosted avatars. That shouldn't be a problem either.

If either of those cause a problem, please, let me know via another thread. I'm going to close this one for future reference to this matter.

Tom