Re: (announcement only) a new great game will be released soon
Moderation:
At this point in time, I'm not issuing any punishments, but that's only because there is not enough conclusive info just yet on who deserves what sort of repercussion.
Here's what I know.
1. A couple of months ago, Simter was ostensibly hacked. We locked the account, found a way to contact him, changed his password to a random string of characters, sent him an email with this new temporary password and told him to change it to something new at his earliest convenience. He did it. No further problems for him.
2. Now Tonio, a friend of Simter, has had the same thing happen to him. What strikes me fishy is that Simter was able to guess Tonio's password, reset his email and change it to something else, basically doing the same thing for him that we did, minus the banning. First of all, this is accessing someone else's account, which is problematic, but it was done in what seems a good cause. But why were two people who seem to be friendly hacked, especially when it is so easy to just return their accounts to them?
3. As another user pointed out, an admin account has not been hacked in order to maximize damage. This strikes me as fishier yet. I mean, I'm glad that none of us have been hacked, if hacking is even what's going on here, but yeah. Definitely peculiar.
So I have two main theories here. The first is more likely, and the second will probably piss a couple of folks off, but I can't take it entirely out of play.
Theory 1: an inept brute-force password guesser with personal grudges
Theory 2: a conspiracy of Simter and friends to either drum up sympathy for themselves and their cause, or hatred of someone against whom they have a grievance
Evidence for the first theory is that both Simter and tonio were targeted, and the same basic thing was tried for both. Also, account info changed, and typing style was no longer consistent with previous posts of the targeted account.
Evidence for the second theory is that Simter just so happened to have been able to guess Tonio's password even after he was ostensibly hacked, which I find particularly troubling. It is, as I said, a much less likely theory, so I'm not acting on it yet, but I can't entirely count it out, either. It's quite possible that whoever took Tonio's account is truly an idiot and used a super easy-to-guess password.
So yeah. In future, if a "hack" like this is going to occur, here's what will happen:
1. As soon as we see it, we'll lock the account.
2. We'll make every effort to find a legitimate off-site way to get hold of the person whose account was compromised
3. We'll change this account's password to something random, and will communicate with the person to let them know of their new password and to inform them to change it at their earliest convenience.
4. We'll unlock the account after communication is made, and when next the user signs in, they'll have their account back and can tweak things as they need
5. If we determine that the "hacker" is someone on this website under another name, they will be banned, very likely permanently. Don't take someone else's account, even if you have the password. Just...don't do it. We aren't going to treat this gently.
That said, it's important to note that your account is generally your responsibility. If you have ridiculously easy-to-guess passwords, please change that immediately. We'll do what we can to help, but I feel as if some of these problems might have been made more likely by using easier passwords with guessable strings. It is never the fault of a victim when they are victimized, but that doesn't mean a victim can't be more careful.
I apologize that I didn't get to this sooner, but I wasn' here for most of the last couple of days. I dealt with things as soon as I saw them.
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