i honestly do not know where you get stealing from. It was as much mine or Levi's as it was xfir's. The post is the responsibility of the poster. It even read that in the TOS.
BTW, just so you all know, I did ask Punboy whether I could rightfully/ properly copy the forums, etc to a new site weeks before we actually did it. He said it was perfectly fine, as it's the responsibility of the webmaster to set permissions properly to prevent users getting access to material they didn't intend to have access to. If he had told me no I wouldn't have done it.
furthermore, we didn't intend to do this as fast as we did it.
We did want to inform people that it was going to happen, etc, so it wouldn't be a total shock. however something was accidentally pasted in irc which tipped xfir off so we had to move immediately or risk losing data.
If we had failed to move given those circumstances, xfir would probably have deleted the forum database anyway, and we'd be left with nothing.
We had no other alternative once xfir figured out what was occurring.
Also: I believe that some people (who remain unnamed) are misinformed on the situation. They believe it was wrong since well 'xfir didnt do anything bad'. First of all:
- Most of them have no clue how he treated the admins. Almost all administrative decisions were made in private areas of the forums, or private irc discussions which the general public don't even know about, they were for discussion among the leaders of the board.
- Many of the misinformed don't use IRC. The events that caused us to want to move occurred in IRC. xfir himself in IRC claimed that "OP2 was dying". IRC is so much a different world than the forums are, for those who don't use it probably only see about 25% or less of all the things that happen in the community.
One thing that should have been visible to all users was the constant pruning of your PM inboxes. This was totally inappropriate in my opinion. Contrary to what anyone tells you, PM's take up a very insignificant amount of space, since they are just text. Text compresses very well in webserver backups, etc so it's not a problem to back up.
Before the move xfir had limited everyone to 100 PMs.
I have increased everyone's limit to 1,000 PM's, because again there is no need for this pruning of PMs, you can store as much as you need in the PM boxes. It doesn't slow down the forum at all.
Another thing he did which is wrong is the deletion of users with invalid e-mail accounts, even some who used the forums and were active.
One such person I can think of is Phantom. His account was deleted manually by xfir (there is no auto delete system) because his email bounced when the forum tried to send to him.
The only reasons I can think of deleting users is if they sign up, never post at all, and are never seen again. Phantom did not fall into this category at all.
And also: Deletion of the IBStore. Even though I didn't personally like the IBstore, I did not want it removed without the consent of the users first. Instead of asking anyone, he simply deleted it one day. This angered many. To make matters worse, he didn't even delete the mod completely, so remnants of the IBstore are still visible (even now. I do want to reinstate the Store though because the community originally wanted it, and would only remove it if the community voted it out.)
Not deleting the mod totally shows extreme laziness (which he admitted) and is not something you want in a leader. A leader must be someone who is devoted.
BTW CK9: xfir did have improper security. almost all of his files were CHMODed 644 or better, allowing anyone with a valid account and some PHP scripting knowledge to retrieve ANY files on the site.
For the people who don't know what CHMOD 644 means, it basically means any valid user on that webserver could read the files sitting in his account, no 'hacking' or 'cracking' necessary.
Any one of us could have done it, the only reason I did it was because I have had experience with these types of things and know how they work.
There was no 'hack' or anything unusual that needed to happen in order to retrieve the files, it was a simple UNIX tar command that I used.
And I think we've said numerous times: We can't please everyone. This is a gaming forum, not a chitchat forum, so we have to do what will be in the best interests for OP2 gaming.
From this point forward I wish to have public votes for major decisions that affect the community, so the people have their interests at hand and not the interests of one leader who doesn't even support the community.
-- op2hacker
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