I would like to apologize to everyone who may have lost an account after over 3,000 members were deleted without my approval. These accounts can not be retrieved, but can be remade by whoever lost one.

This was not suppose to happen and I am sorry about this. If you have lost an account that had anything on it, please post in the Sales Counter with the name of the account and the stuff you believe has been lost.

Again, I am very sorry about this and it will never happen again.

- Veronn

Holy monkeys, what happened?

Was this related to the explosion at the invisionfree data center? Was it an outside attack? Did someone just get a little trigger happy hunting spambots?

No, it has nothing to do with the explosion at Invisionfree. I have not been able to talk with AD yet and when I do I will have more information for you.

Will wait patiently untill then.



Or I'll try...



*gnaws on desk in impatience*

To help with the search, couldn't you just look at the moderator/admin logs in the admin login page? Unless it was hacks, I supose...

Wow... I can only imagine how this happened. >_<


Any root admin like Laoura (and Veronna?) can go look at the admin logs and see who deleted members. *nods*

Thought of this at work... It's late... Forgive my incoherentness.

In the wake of the recent SpamBot attacks, we've gone to the validating member system where once you sign up you get to see only one forum board. I noticed that all my alts that were deleted were validating members, though I have no idea how they go to be that status since they were around way before these SpamBot attacks.

Is it possible we have code that deletes the validating members group after a certain amount of time? And is it possible that all the alts that were deleted were stuck as validating members?

Do we have rogue code?

There isn't a code that can do that, it was most likely an accidental deletion by one of the admins. >_<

The deletions only partly have to do with the spam. It's also the cleaning out of old inactive accounts with no posts, no siggy and no activity. AD probably took it upon herself to upon herself to help Veronna get the job done. Your retired characters should have been safe, like zorgn.

If AD deleted any members that were active at one point it's likely because she didn't make sure actual post made were 0 rather than the post count which has always been used as gold. The biggest problem would probably be with long time players with alts not used in quite some time that they thought they still might want to use later, but thankfully most of the time people transfer all their items to the active account so that should be too big a problem.

No, what happened is the codes for the find member and and the member deletion don't work the same when it's more then one member. I normally only delete one member (spam) at a time. If I had known that it wouldn't have happened. I was looking around and saw in the Validating Members group, all members with 0 posted had no information in their signatures and no post history. There was a lot of them. So I decided to go tell the Delete member to delete all of them with 0 posts. It deleted all the members who were considered Validating Members, aka all who didn't go to their emails and confirm that they were members.

I've been spending the last two days going through the shop history and the archives and more trying to find all the actual members gold and items so that I have that... Thus me being on and so far only posting anywhere once...

I can't find out who the members are now, but I was thinking the best way to fix it is to remake the accounts without the address, perhaps create a new group, and post somewhere that if your character was one of the following: <list names and explain what happened> then your password has been reset to <?>

With the posts and shops, they should be able to get everything back except for the things everyone lost when IF crashed. Their threads are still here after all... and I officially hate the delete member function... -_-

I apologize to everyone for screwing up, but I don't know what else to do... :(

Hum. It had to be more than just the validating members that got deleted, though. 3,000 members out of 3,500 can't be how many people were left in the validating group because it wasn't even turned on for the first several years of Imythess' existence. I only turned it on a year or two ago, something like that, when spam started becoming prevalent. We already had several thousand members by then, and I'm sure that more than just the 500 remaining members have posted before.

I don't know of any possible way to find out who was deleted unless you spent a lot of time manually looking through all kinds of places on the board and writing a list of usernames. Which would be an extreme burden of time and fruitless effort that is highly unlikely to give you any results. :/ I also don't know how good of an idea it is to re-register these accounts for other people, if that's what you meant by remaking them. Think of how many of those old accounts were inactive and won't be having anyone come claim them. :unsure:

Sorry if I sound like a downer, I'm just trying to help give you some information. Let me know if you need any help, okay? *hugs everyone*

Didn't know. Trying to help. Sorry Loth.

Funny thing, my retired Alts are safe. Now, the three I lost were for some reason classified as Validating Members. I logged in with one of them two days before the delete. They were around a hell of a long time before the Validating Member group was even made, so what bothers me is how they got that classification. I see no reason why some would be there, but not others.

Hoped you wouldn't find out I was here, Ace... I knew I shouldn'tve retired Zorgn.

Yeah, I noticed that. I think that for some reason a large batch of accounts were moved into the validating group, which is how so many got deleted even though they were good accounts. :huh:

This is making my head hurt for little return.

How did all our retired characters get retired? Did Validating get set to be the default, and all who weren't retired or active (or one of the other wierd groups) get set to validating?

I do believe validating is the new default. You move up to member/active member by posting in the only available topic. Spambots try and make new topics and are thus thwarted before becoming members. There are only five people in the member group, so it's likely everyone one not sent to retired or active got sent to validating. Inactive members with posts and such were probably sent to retired by AD I'm surprised that's such a large group and only just noticed that the number was 3000 O.o . Talk about a pruning.

Oh and you can't hide from Ace, Donner XP. You can always unretire him anytime you like. But, meh can't wait to rp with your new character later.

I had no intention of deleting them all, I was just trying to get rid of the ones who had no posts and no signature, and no histroy, which I looked through before trying to delete them I have no idea why it removed them all... thus me officially hating it... I had moved all members who posted in the last 100 days and some from the last 200 days to either active or retired members groups about a month ago. I did this one person at a time and it took me a while, so anyone who had posted then was not deleted and should all be fine. It was just the Validating Member group, which I have just learned is where ALL the members were moved to. I didn't move them, so I don't know when exactly that was, but it wasn't long ago. All of them would either be new members from the last month or older members who I hadn't moved to the Retired Character group yet.

I was in the process of moving all members who hadn't logged in since 2006 to the Retired Character group and by request you can retire a character you no longer wish to play. This was mentioned and pinned in the Welcome area, as that is where most returning people post first and where they are most likely to see it if they wish to return their character to active status.