1. What happened? We experienced some "forum vandalism" which originated from The Political Pit. In short, someone discovered that they had some permissions that normally only a moderator or admin would have, and they moved some threads, locked them, etc. 2. How could that occur? These forums have used a variety of software platforms over the years. Most recently, we migrated from vBulletin to Xenforo. During the import of users, threads, posts, apparently some permissions didn't transfer properly. The result was that members of the group The Political Pit inherited a higher level of permissions - the ability to delete, move, lock message threads that were posted by others. 3. So ANYONE in the The Political Pit group had that ability? Yes. However, only one lowlife jerk acted on it and vandalized the forums. 4. So you know who vandalized the forums? Actually, no. Xenforo maintains an Admin log and a Moderator log. That tracks anything that happens on the forums that are done by an Admin/Moderator. In this case, the vandal (jerk) used a subset of moderator permissions that where inherited. In other words, because the vandal wasn't actually a moderator/admin, their actions were not logged by the system. Besides correcting the inherited permissions issue, a 3rd party module will be used going forward that produces a log of all actions on the board, regardless of moderator/admin status. 5. The forums were down for almost a week. Why did it take so long? It was a complicated issue. After finding that adjusting permissions settings was causing unexpected results in other areas of the forums, we contacted Xenforo for support. As the tech was in a different time zone, it slowed the process of identifying the problem, applying the fix and then testing, testing, testing. Thanks for your patience during the time we were addressing this issue. Should you encounter any problems in the forums as you use them, please let us know.
Happy you are back online. Sounds like this jerk must be a computer geek. Certainly above my knowledge.
