Ask an Admin day 2010Follow

Are Kirby and Manosuke the same person?

Close, they're friends/roomates. They're pretty much the same person though.

In that scenario, he would be evaporated by a death ray ahead of time...



It's usually not bad actually. There was a time when the OOT forum in particular was, shall we say less than amieable to visits from admins other than Magi. a situation we later discovered was fostered by that particular admin in large part. I guess that would be one of the more infuriating situations. There was months of crap on the admin side in the admin IRC channels with Magi before we even found out about anything in the forums. We're talking major sexual harrasment type crap that never got resolved because the tone of things in those channels can sometimes be less than professional, so even though he was taking things way over the limit, he was never doing so in front of witnesses or where anyone high enough up the chain could really do anything about it for a variety of reasons. That whole situation was a mess.

Anyways, thats one of the reasons the whole "ask an admin" tradition started was to try and foister less hostility in OOT. I think it helped some? I dunno.



Sure and probably not?



yes. yes you doe!



If you enter the right code, Clstr 7 self destructs

Another question: Why does alla need it's own time zone converter?

How sure are you on that second one, on a scale of Earth to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

Thanks for the honest answer Kao. For the people that actually think I was being mean by asking such a question. Your wrong. I often wondered what the pay was for being an admin on a large forum. I've been a mod/admin on several forums over the years including MSN's Transgender forums years back before they closed nearly all of them down. I still mod several forums yet. None pay their mods for the help. Only Alla seems to pay their admin/mods.

Edited, Nov 16th 2010 12:10am by Tailmon

Has there been attacks on the Alla site?

Yes, Many over the years. The most devistating of these was the 3 month long DDOS attacks we experianced back in 2007? 2008? somewhere in there. That particular attack origionated out of China, was persistant, and backed by a largeish botnet. Our existing router at the time was not capable of null routing invalid attacks. Ironically, the attack in question was aimed at Microsoft SQL server, and was completely ineffectuall against our MySQL based infrastructure, aside from bogging the hell out of the site. We lost alot of forum users over that. There have been other, smaller attacks over the years which have had little impact. Mass forum spammings, etc. About a year ago, someone was able to steal a portion of our user e-mail database. If you search forum=3 you can probably find the thread in question. There was apperently a short lived exploit that allowed the person in question to spoof admin credentials and run a script against the database. I don't know which admin was involved, other than it was not me. They didn't get anything else besides a portion of the e-mail table, which was bad enough.

Someone once managed to use an XSS vulnerability to briefly impersonate my account on the forum edit commands once 4 years ago. I was online at the time, they edited one of Jophiels posts before I was able to hijack it back and the vulnerability was fixed. Unfortunatly for them it logged their IP doing so, they weren't using a proxy, and were in the US...

Oh, there's always the classics such as when someone manages to post with their sockpuppet account logged in, thus outing the existance of said puppet to the people of the thread they were trying to use it in. It's even more fun when they leave for a month or two, then come back and figure no one remembers. Self banning goldsellers are fun too "Hey, lets spam RMT ads in forum=3! no one will notice, right?" We had one spammer in particular who kept editing his post to try and get rid of the CANNOTLINKTO message. We're talking 14-15 edits with this poor spammer trying to edit the link enough to make it show up, and Danalog sitting their at the same time adding everything he tried to the filter.

We banned all of russia and China once. That was hilarious.

I get a kick out of people who report that other people are karma camping them, and then I go and check and discover that they have their own ratebot and are not only rating themselves up, but karma camping the person they just reported, who isn't even rating them in the first place! That one happens alot more often than you might think actually...

The Niobia internet Lawyer thread was pretty amusing at the time. That or the few threads where Allakhazam decided to make silly posts (The no N's post being a classic example of that)

Ah, good times.

30, and 15.


94.

Is there a way to delete an account on the user end? I was looking one time and couldn't find a way to do so.

Kao/Admin, how many people have asked to have me banned?

You are able to render an account unusable by you if you change the e-mail address to something impossible and then retrieve password. You cannot remove the content, and we don't generally ban accounts on request, because usually the people requesing that want it removed because they were being idiots and want to eliminate all evidence.