2007 Forum Gaming attack

From Charas Project

The 2007 Forum Gaming attack refers to an incident occurring on January 23, 2007. Sometime in the early morning (ChST), the Complete Resources Uploader Team and Forum Gaming forums were "nuked"; that is, all of the threads in both forums had been mass-deleted. A part of the Tutorials forum had been deleted, but the attacker mysteriously stopped. The culprit was revealed to be Warxe PhoenixBlade, who was de-modded permanently.

Contents

The Attack

The attack started around 12:37, 23/01/07 ChST, in the Complete Resources Uploader Team forum. Around 2:00, the attacker cleared out that forum, and moved on to Forum Gaming. This was attacked at a much faster rate, ending around 2:40, when the attacker moved on to Tutorials. However, for an unknown reason, the attacker stopped after only a few minutes; only about a page of Tutorials was deleted.

The Aftermath

Shortly after, Razor made a thread about the incident. Early indications pointed to Warxe PhoenixBlade, then moderator of Forum Gaming, as the culprit - the Mod Activity Logfile showed that he performed around 300 deletion actions that night. Everyone was bewildered by this, even Warxe himself, who claimed to know nothing about the event. Later on, Alex was able to restore both the CRUT and Forum Gaming forums, although only to mid-December; now, they could focus on the event itself.

The Trial

After an interrogation on MSN, SaiKar announced that Warxe would be put on "trial", with the thoughts of the public largely determining his fate. Despite overwhelming evidence against him (Alex himself posted IP information, which confirmed that the attack came from Warxe's computer) most people still supported Warxe - he even got himself a "lawyer" in the form of Trevlac. However, as time went on, the community started to realize the truth, but most still advocated for a "slap on the wrist" rather than a ban; this was followed by a post by Warxe, where he confessed to the attack and admonished those who still believed in his innocence. SaiKar proclaimed Warxe "guilty" and the thread was locked - Warxe was stripped of his moderation powers permanently, and also refused access to the Complete Resources - however, he was not banned. The thread ended on a sour note when the user Archem2 made a foul comment about Warxe, effectively causing the thread to be locked and respect for Archem to be reduced.

Changes to the Forum

As was mentioned before, Alex was only able to restore the forums up to mid-December 2006, meaning that about a month of Forum Gaming posts were lost (CRUT was only slightly affected). However, this was seen as not totally negative by some: Razor's first post in this thread indicates that the last month of Forum Gaming posts were of low quality.

To the Staff

On January 31st, Osmose was given Global Moderator status. Mod "tryouts" are ongoing to find moderators for RPG Maker Programming/Tutorials and All of All; Forum Gaming doesn't need a mod, according to Osmose.

References

  1. http://charas-project.net/forum/admin/0_control.html Mod Activity Logfile
  2. http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=19438&forumid=12&catid=6 Razor's thread
  3. http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=19462&forumid=12&catid=6 The "trial"
  4. http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=5511&forumid=32&catid=6&page=282 Comment by Razor
  5. http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=19533&forumid=12&catid=6&page=6 Comment by Osmose

See Also

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