The user who posted "time sensitive favor" is not legit. For your safety and security, do not go to any of those links.

Thanks for helping to watch out for the site's members.

-- BK

I've seen similar links when scrolling through websites for reptile breeders when I was looking towards adopting a turtle. Sadly, there seems to be a group of people taking advantage of people looking for pets to either make money and give them nothing in return, or put a virus on their device.

@Shadane It's so hard to be sure, especially since that person's account has been around for a while and had info, a journal entry, and a friend. It might have been an innocent user who got hacked, or it might have been someone who was studying the site to write scripts to build an army of bots. Some of the forums/games/sites that I do work for are under constant assault from those types of people. Over the last decade or so, I've done work to help design safety gates that will interrupt bot scripts from creating new user accounts, and prevent them from being able to automatically post on profiles and forums. Those measures work for a while, but there are always real humans lurking below the radar, who keep poking at things and rewriting their scripts to overcome the obstacles. It gets to be so bad that an average forum will either be riddled with malicious spam, or locked down so tightly that new users can't figure out how to even ask for help.

I've been thinking about something for Side7, based on a mix of some things that have worked well in other places, but I'm not the person who would be doing the coding to create it, so I can't say how realistic or complicated it would actually be to set up. Essentially, though, new users (or, maybe all users, including those of us with hundreds or thousands of posts under our belt) would need to complete a tutorial to earn a (free) Account Upgrade from scrub to citizen; er, from Newbie to Member. The tutorial would basically be like a Captcha, instructing the user what to do to verify their account, in a useful sort of way that would also serve as a guided tour of Side7. Like, it would begin by asking the user to fill out some of the basic information in their profile, and then direct them to their Account Settings, asking them to read the tutorial info carefully for a clue on how to proceed; something like, "Block the User named DirtyNastySpamDevil" or "Go to the Message Center page and check the box that asks if you're human" or "Go to the Forums>Community>Introductions and reply to the Pinned Post called "Reality Check" -- tell us your favorite color." (I figure, default Forum Posting rights would be limited to this one theoretical post, until they complete the tutorial. Their account status wouldn't allow them to send DMs, comment on artwork, post threads, or reply to any other forum threads.) And then, if they do, the final step in the tutorial would bounce them to the Side7 Credits Store where they could claim a Free Upgrade, unlocking the full forum-posting privileges of a verified user.

But, again, I have no idea if anything like that could be added to the existing site code, or if it would cause more problems than it solves. Adding new code might break the site on mobile browsers, or the example tutorial I used might be too confusing for non-native English speakers, or people who use screen readers, or pop-up blockers.

Edited to add: After looking at the user's profile and publicly viewable off-site links, I am inclined to believe that she consciously posted all of those links because her intentions were genuinely good -- not because her account was hacked or because she was trying to do bad things. All the same, better safe than ransomware'd. Stay vigilant.