Admin accounts gone?

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I was weirded out to see that Spiderman is ostensibly a "guest" here. Wondered what happened to his account. Then I saw that the same issue also seems to be affecting TomB.

What is going on?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Alright, this is totally the result of some hack/shenanigans/nefariousness. Spidey emailed me and confirmed this. Sent a PM to Ed. If anyone else happens along with any bright ideas, well, go for it?
 

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
That must have just happened since Monday. Spidey changed my email (it was a Lycos account) since I forgot my password and it won't let you change the email without it.
 

Ed Sullivan

CPA Founder, Web Guy
Staff member
Well, we're back. Not perfect as a few forums were deleted as well as a couple active accounts, but I've imported most content to a new install (to avoid any nefarious actions I may have missed) so we should be good to go.

As mentioned in the notice at the top of the page, the only user accounts brought over were those that were active very recently, so hopefully that should help prevent any issues like this in the future.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Wow, this is great! I thought it entirely reasonable that Ed would need to resort to some old backed-up version of the forums from last year or whatever. I had just started the process of hunting for my own personal backups of some of the stuff I spent considerable time on, such as the Tribal Report stuff. Haven't been 100% consistent on backing up longform stuff I write here, but I was confident that I had some kind of copy of anything I really cared about. Pleasantly surprised to see that even very recent content is back. Thanks Ed!

So it looks like after whatever fix Ed has deployed, the only casualties are inactive user accounts (which can potentially be linked to their owners if those members do return), private messages, the Rules Questions board, and the Testing Board. Have I got that right? Pity about the Rules Questions board in that case, although presumably we could have a new version of that one started to replace the lost one? If that's desirable, I mean. We used to have a few active judges on the site and got more traffic from newer players, so the Rules Questions board was useful back then.

Private messages being deleted seems pretty low-impact. It might have affected some of the Warhammer Quest stuff. Somewhat bizzarely, I find that I didn't retain backups of the PM content I sent out for Warhammer Quest purposes. So if there was something you needed in there, do let me know and I'll see if I can reconstruct the information from my notes...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Yaaaay! Thanks Ed for doing his wizardry and getting me back and to Oversoul for being the middle man! I thought for sure I was the culprit, good to know I wasn’t.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I suppose that congratulations are in order to Shoe, Shabbaman, and Killer Joe for happening to come back and post recently enough that their accounts were saved. And in contrast, poor TomB and Ferret (who had been here recently) will presumably need to make new accounts. I'd guess that they were targeted for their admin powers.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Anyone know the reason(s) behind this hack? Did someone think this site had some value?
Also, to those admins who got hacked, "p@ssw0rd" is not an acceptable password. You might think changing the vowels makes you clever, but it doesn't. That's why I use "w0rdp@ss" for all my accounts.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Nope, we don’t know the reasons. Aside from deleting the admin group and approving SealTeamBill, they deleted those odd forums that Oversoul noted and some ways the forum was displayed. No real rhyme or reason.

You’ll have to bring up the password issue with CT, if he ever returns....
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Nope, we don’t know the reasons. Aside from deleting the admin group and approving SealTeamBill, they deleted those odd forums that Oversoul noted and some ways the forum was displayed. No real rhyme or reason.
That sounds pretty chaotic. Something a chaotic sort of person would do...

You’ll have to bring up the password issue with CT, if he ever returns....
Ah ha!
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Aside from deleting the admin group and approving SealTeamBill, they deleted those odd forums that Oversoul noted and some ways the forum was displayed. No real rhyme or reason.
It's like breaking into someone's house just to rearrange the furniture.
 

TomB

Administrator
Staff member
Well, this is a pain. TomB here. I was unable to receive the confirmation email through my usual email account, so I made another account through my Gmail account using a different screen name. Sigh...:confused:

OTOH, it's FREAKIN AWESOME that Mike was able to resurrect the place! Thanks man! There would be no CPA without you! :cool:
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Your TomB account was deleted. Are you saying you created a new TomB account but couldn't get the confirmation email so you made a separate Tyresius account?
 

TomB

Administrator
Staff member
Yup, exactly. For some reason I wasn't receiving the confirmation email in my normal email account. And I looked everywhere, including the Spam folder, and tried resending it a couple times. Got nowhere. So I decided to try again using my gmail address, and I didn't know if it would allow another attempt using the TomB user name, so I used another one.

So I'm back and I'm happy with that so...:)

I wouldn't mind getting my old job back though...;)
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I'll PM you. But I can also change your username back to TomB, if you want. It might make it easier for Ed to tie in or relink your old posts.
 
Top