Auto-bans and Account Security

[Wildkins]

No doubt you have noticed lately the massive uptick in automatic bans from the server - this is due to CapitalClassFixes.dll, a file shipped with Discovery Freelancer, wrongly being identified as malware and/or an unwanted program, and being quarantined by your AV. While this has been an issue we've grappled with since the release of 5.0, it seems a recent windows defender update has massively increased false-positive detections of this DLL. Just this morning I've gone through and unbanned some thirty accounts.

We're hoping to release a micro-patch very soon with a new version of the CCF DLL that will hopefully reduce false-positive detections. In the meantime, if you suddenly have issues connecting to the server, double-check that your antivirus (Microsoft Defender or otherwise) has not quarantined CapitalClassFixes.dll or any other Freelancer / Discovery file. Mark the Discovery folder as an exception in your antivirus if you haven't already, and if necessary perform a reinstall of the Discovery files. A full guide has been helpfully written by @Venkman here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2324254

We've also noticed a large uptick in spammers hijacking older or unused forum accounts. While most tend to be accounts with an old sign-in date but little to no forum activity, others have several hundred posts and belong to former members of the community. Likely some spamming organization is making use of one of several data breaches over the past few years to gain access to DiscoveryGC forum accounts and bypass the account activation procedure. You can check which data breaches affect your e-mail address at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ , but in general if you aren't using a UNIQUE, STRONG password for your Discovery forum account, I recommend changing it as soon as possible.