No point keeping anyone in the dark. No-one knows wtf's going on, the owners are nowhere to be seen, but this surfaced today:
No point keeping anyone in the dark. No-one knows wtf's going on, the owners are nowhere to be seen, but this surfaced today:
» msn : cosmicdeathray@hotmail.com //
» gfx : x // » ffvii black ops. : x //
» blog : x // » pm me : x //
» psn : Ben2289 //
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Spoiler: PSNSpoiler: rEtrO_oSpoiler: etc.
Wow, crap went down didn't it?
Yes unfortunately it seems there was a lot of foul play going on behind the scenes here. Whats good is that the owner, and myself, are now aware of whats been going on around here. Not being an active member of the community myself, I never stop in to see whats going on. Despite my intense Squaresoft heritage I don't have time these days to surf the web unless I'm making money for it, and I would assume as much for the owner. I'll be making regular stops in to make sure nothing goes this far again, as well as do my best to improve the look, layout, and general functionality of the forums. Don't think of this as the end, but rather a fresh slate.
Well, first Derek was selling VIP memberships without our knowledge.
The forum went down and we were not notified. We found out during a monthly server check of all of our sites - More below
Files were maliciously deleted even as recent as a few days ago. Fortunately, whoever is attempting to damage the forum is for lack of a better term a complete and utter moron.
People were claiming ownership yet I am the sole owner.
Derek states that SF has "dissolved"? Kind of an odd statement since I am the only person who can dissolve SF.
The largest problem was the issue with the files being deleted.
Here's a more in depth overview of what happened
First, Derek is not an owner or a part owner of the forums or any of my sites.
Derek has been here a long time. He asked me earlier this year if he could have more access to the forum including ftp access so he could improve things. Again he has been here for 7 years and he knew I had no time to devote to the forums.
So I gave him access. It was a no brainer really. Someone who was active and loved the forums wanted to take over and improve it.
Once he took over he made some changes which I felt were improvements. He seemed to be active and overall doing a decent job. In July one of my servers had a MAJOR php issue which effected about 30 sites. He let me know and we fixed it.
Moving ahead to last month - On or about October 16th there is a post from Derek saying he shut off the forums. There were mods and admins posting up until the second week in November but the forum was shut off.
I was not notified nor was my programmer. Derek does say he sent us both emails however neither of us received them and Derek did not receive a bounce back. He has never forwarded me the email he claims to have sent.
He never sent a follow up email to the one he claims to have initially sent. To be fair maybe he did send an email and maybe for whatever reason his email client failed. I know it was not on our end or he would have received 2 bounce backs from each of us but why not follow up?
So the second week in November I am doing my site maintenance. Basically, 2 of us go through every hosted site and check for inconsistencies. We more or less are looking for malware or leeches who may be stealing bandwidth or piggybacking on some of our blog sites. I noticed that square forums looked odd and went straight to the site or where the site was anyway and it was a white screen.
I immediately grabbed a programmer and had him check it out. This was at the end of our day so we stayed late and tried to find the errors or the cause of the problem. We finally left and the next day started going through the database etc. We both emailed Derek to see if he made a change and something broke. He responded I think that day or the next and in a nutshell told us he didn't make any changes and the site had been down for weeks. He offered no more information.
Mark tried to at least get a date and he said a "few weeks ago". So we were left to search blind for the problem.
We searched and checked logs and did find out what I mentioned earlier that Derek turned the forum off. We also found that there were changes made by someone before the crash. We also found the "other" forum which was set up as a place for people to go while this forum was down. Kind of odd that we were not asked to simply put up a back up the day the problem happened 0.o
Over the past week we have found a LOT of issues in the back end. We have been working on the site at least a couple to a few hours per day. Since we didn't know when or what the error was we had to put a back up online which was prior to recent added hacks and plug-ins. That is what you are seeing now.
While we have been updating someone has been deleting files so we have blocked everyone other than my employees.
Derek was selling VIP memberships which we did not know until now. This was a big surprise as you can imagine.
People are claiming "ownership" or that they are partners. This is not the case. I am the only owner.
We spoke to Derek last week via email and he said he was going to put the skins back up as well as do some other stuff. That was 6 days ago and we have not heard from him. A simple "Hey I don't have time" would have been fine. BUT RL is more important and I really don't think Derek was trying to be malicious. He's probably just busy doing other stuff.
We have fixed a LOT of the problems. As I have been typing this Mark has told me he fixed the avatars and signatures. He has also fixed the PM system. He will be working on the site and skins over the holiday weekend.
Here are the upcoming changes in no particular order:
- Add Vbulletin CMS
- Add shout
- Add suggested plug ins
- Fix forum hierarchy
- rework VIP benefits and system
- Reinstate some admins still here
- Change/add SE game subcategories
- Fix RPG
- add/fix arcade script
- Add community builder and social networking plugins
Basically, we are changing a lot of stuff as fast as possible so feel free to ask questions or suggest additions.
More info will be available as I have it.......
wow that's alot to take in, really appriciate you guys filling us in about what has been happening since noone has really known what has been going on. How long do you think it will take before all the server error bugs are fixed in terms of posting?
No too long but this is a holiday weekend here so not sure how much will get done before Monday.
Posting right now should work as normal as far as I know but if you encounter a bug we will be working on and off all weekend and anything which hampers posting will be fixed as fast as possible.
I know it's already been said, but thanks again for taking the time to post a thorough explanation to us.
» msn : cosmicdeathray@hotmail.com //
» gfx : x // » ffvii black ops. : x //
» blog : x // » pm me : x //
» psn : Ben2289 //
![]()
Spoiler: PSNSpoiler: rEtrO_oSpoiler: etc.
Wow thats pretty crazy. i know the major problem i have noticed about this forum over the years is the owners dont really show up on the forums and post ever, so no one knows who they are or who to contact when stuff gets wrong. i suppose that would be the responsibility of the admins, or whoever has access to contacting you. I saw that you guys have a lot of other sites, which is quite impressive. I just think the main issue that has always plagued this place is lack of communication between the owners and the rest of the forum till something like this happens.