I assume every reader of these boards knows better than this, but if you get a PM from someone you don't know asking you to visit a link under some pretense, don't click on the link. Do report the person sending said PMs to me or another mod, however.

Thanks for the warning, I just received this PM but saw the banned tag under the user name so I went to check the forums first

Pretty poor job of social engineering, IMO.

A proper attempt would've said something like "Hey sorry to message you out of the blue, but I have a theorycraft spreadsheet I wanted to post but I don't want to embarrass myself as I'm new here, and I was wondering if you could take a look at it ( <URL> ) for a second to make sure it's mostly accurate."

I'm not going to lie, I haven't had my coffee yet this morning and I might've actually clicked that.

So would I probably. Which brings me to this interesting question:
How many of these keyloggers can be stopped by a good functioning updated Antivirus? I obviously havent ever clicked one of those links, so I wouldnt know what my AV (Avira Antivir) would do, but maybe someone here has experience with it?

NoScript will indeed usually keep keyloggers from working on Firefox. It saved my ass once on a WoW forums link I clicked on absentmindedly. However, I wouldn't really want to risk it on a known malicious link. It's sort of like messing with Biohazard waste just because you have gloves. Even though NoScript gets updated all the time, I wouldn't put 100% faith in it.

I found the background story behind that PM to be pretty amusing. Some chick has a disagreement with her boyfriend and you, the EJ reader, must restore her confidence in herself! It's almost as believable as the "most sex girl ever" posts that seem to pop up on the general forums every now and then.

Let it be known that henceforth WoW players are now the supreme arbiters of literature and that we can no longer give our opinions on such matters without severe deliberation, because great responsibility comes with this great power.

Man, I actually felt special that I had been chosen to resolve a literary conflict between to lovers.

Then someone in the office mentioned they brought in cake today, narrowly saving me from putting my account at risk.

This is what we get for having links to the EJ forums on the Official WOW forums

Now seriously, if anyone does fall for this kind of trick, well, he's likely not going to have security software in the first place...

Analyzing what you read/see/hear/etc is just a product of being a rational person, not the product of reading a critical forum, playing a specific game, or otherwise being a smug bastard.

Ah, but we're not just smug bastards - we're Elitist Jerks.

I have this vision in my head of you holding a butterfly in your hand named, 'Enjoyment of Life', then crushing the life out of that butterfly. You know, when you get the dust-stuff off their wings all over your hand? Yeah, that would be the souls of the thousands of innocent and harmless jokes you just murdered.

Yeah, I actually checked my email first and got my self in trouble over it. I used to have dreams of being an author so figured what the hell, I can at least take a glance at it.

Anyway, to whoever said that that the site's not malicious, it is. I just spent the last hour cleaning every file created today off my pc and changing all my passwords after one of those you have blah blah spyware screens popped up (you know the ones that are almost always directing you to download more spyware).