I apologize for the blandness of this page, but there's no reason to make it pretty. :p The timeline has been reconstructed from logs from various sources, which is partly why it took so long... plus I was just plain busy the past two weeks.
What the heck happened to SFGHQ?
A short work of non-fiction by Smidge204
Sunday, March 13th, 2005.
9:59PM Eastern US time, the individual who goes by the nickname "Manickillaz" ('MK' from now on) registers on the SFGHQMB. Of course, the first thing he does is break nearly every rule we had. Great way to make a first impression! Original text of his first post can be found here*.
So, of course, he was banned.
Also note that at this time I had already started making a backup of the forum database. I already knew he talked a lot of about being a hacker, so I wasn't going to take any risks. About 5 minutes after I had completed the backup, he had indeed hacked the forum and began changing the forum names and descriptions around.
With the help of another SFGHQ admin: Rebanned, unadmined (since he had gained admin privileges, which was how he was making the changes) and account info scrambled to buy us some time, but at that point it was more or less too late... he had his foot in the door. Things quieted down and I called it a night.
MK later claimed he was drunk (see log below), which was why he was acting like such an . Of course I can't confirm or deny that, so I won't comment further on it.
Of course, the next morning he was back. (Of course it wouldn't be that easy!) At least this time he had't destroyed the place, and was "mingling" with the others.
He now claimed that he was the forum's new mod "whether we liked it or not." (context*) Of course we didn't, and nobody seemed to shy away from telling him that. The members of the forum rejected him like a botched kidney transplant. They make me so proud when they're not being a bunch of whiny, insolent and occasionally domineering little children! I'd post examples but it's a real pain in the to dig them up from the backups...
Shortly after the bashing he took from our members, the first page of General Discussion 'magically' vanished, erasing all the unfavorable posts. Guess he doesn't take criticism very well! (Yeah, he'll make a 'good mod' alright. Is that his way of "keeping the place neat"?) I restricted access to GD to prevent people from posting in it, since it would be easier to restore the damage if I didn't have to work around new posts.
Monday was pretty uneventful otherwise, until I had a chance to talk to MK in person over IRC. There's a log of it, of course, here*. IF you would like to save some reading time, it basically went like this:
<MK> Make me a mod or I'll destroy the site.
<Smidge> Go ahead.
<MK> Oka... wait, what?
So that's pretty much how my night went... eventually, after much resistance, he offered to leave SFGHQ alone if I made him an op in #srb2, The chatroom on the same IRC network that these chat logs are from (which technically I founded but only on the current network, since we moved from the now completely defunct Mysteria network, and actually has NOTHING to do with SFGHQ except a handful of SFGHQ regulars hang out there. Go figure.)
There was some additional chitchat here. Basically making nice-nice.
I guess MK really thought it was a done deal, based on the way he started acting in #srb2. Here's yet another log of that commotion... man, I'm glad I was asleep for most of that mess. Of course I wasn't too impressed with that (match the timestamps), considering his claims that he'd be a good mod.
After thinking about it as I promised I would, and prolonged discussions with other people from both #srb2 and SFGHQ staffs, I decided on the answer (This channel is secret, so channel name and topic were removed). On Tuesday, 5:01 PM Eastern Time, I gave him my answer just as I promised.
Sorry, No deal.
Rather than give in to his threats, and in doing so alienate myself from the people I already consider my friends and whom I know I can trust, I deleted SFGHQ. Every last part of it. (...but not before making backups of course. I'm not that reckless!)
It took MK about 20 minutes to join the chatroom, that's when things really got fun! You can read the log here.
I slept well that night.
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So where do we go from here?
Yes, SFGHQ will be rebuilt, in full. There is a small group of skillful and trustworthy people working on it, a little bit every day.
No, SAGE has NOT been cancelled. It hasn't even been delayed. Expect it to be in June as it's been planned since last November. (And no, we still don't have a definite date for it!)
We are going to get the main site back in operation first, since that is more important. We expect everything to be ready with that by late April. The forum is still in discussion, but it WILL be ready for SAGE. Until then, the old EZBored* is available for you frustration.
Hang tight!
=Smidge=
