I want to clear up a couple of things for everyone, as there have been things going on lately that are destroying the forums. I want to explain the truth behind all of this and answer any and all quesitons about it. I have seen many chat logs where certain people have manipulated the truth in an attempt to destroy my reputation and create havoc in the forums... something they're actively attempting.
Firstly, the thing with mar77a.
Last year, I asked mar77a to poke around the U13 site and find any problems with it. At this time, I was storing passwords in plaintext. Over the past 3-4 years I have been teaching mar77a many different programming languages and teaching him about soldat servers, web servers, and tons of other things. I trust him more than just about anyone else in the community.
While he was looking around, he found a couple of holes that he told me about. I promptly fixed these problems and also switched the passwords to be stored as hashes instead of plaintext.
Just before we switched to the new forums, mar77a told me that he knew the address to the new forums (the temporary address we were using). I asked him how he found it, and he gave me his normal "I don't want to tell you, you'll be angry." I promised him that I wouldn't and asked him to tell me.
He told me that back when he found those holes in the old U13 site, he found Stalky's password. He kept Stalky's password and used it to log into the soldat forums to read the Moderators and Admins Only forum (apparently his password was the same on both).
I know mar77a better than probably anyone else in the community, I know that he can be trusted even if he makes one or two bad decisions here and there. He is not malicious and he did nothing with Stalky's password except read the moderator forums, though he could have done just about anything else since that password was the same as Stalky's password e-mail, paypal.... and just about anything else.
Stalky left the forums not just because of a huge debte sparked by this (he didn't know mar77a and demanded that I ban him), but also because of other issues he had with the higher-ups of the forums. I honestly don't know the details of most of it, but I do know that he was being unreasonable about mar77a and demanded that he was banned.
Enesce:
Enesce and I have a long history. Back long ago he used to create hacks. Two or three years ago, before I was even a moderator (back in the days of Styx), EnEsCe said that he was done hacking and he got out of the biz. I talked to him and asked him if he was really done, and if he wanted to come back into the community and use his knowledge for good. He wanted to.
I came here and made a thread petitionining for him to be allowed back in . Many people agreed that he could do great things as long as a watchful eye was kept on him. MM and Styx also agreed to have him back.
Him and I have worked together in taking the offensive against Soldat hackers as a whole, and we've had great success. He has taken a lot of crap from the hackers and is under constant attack from them. He is one of the people in the community I respect most, for many reasons that I will not go into here.
Since then, he has done nothing wrong, except one thing recently. He has been very competitive towards me since we both rent out Soldat Servers in the US. I have no problem with this.
One night, he was browsing around the Soldat Server control panel that Elephant Hunter and I have been working on. He found a bug that allowed him to start/stop/restart anyone's server without even being logged in. He tried to tell me about it on IRC, but I was asleep. I woke up in the morning to find some of my customers' servers turned off, and I found hard proof that it was him.
I confronted him about it the next day (or maybe the day after) after telling everyone on IRC about it. I have to admit, it sounded a lot worse than it was. After a bit of resistance, he admitted what he did and we talked a lot of things out. EnEsCe and I are now on better terms than I think we ever have been before. We look forward to working together to improve the quality of the soldat servers, the icky lobby server code, and the game itself.
Louis Ex.
Some people want to know what the hell is going on with him, and I want to tell you that he is a poster boy for what I'm trying to do against the soldat hackers.
After I found his blog post (look through the Sin Bin for my post about him originally getting banned) about how he wanted to hack the forums, I banned him and locked him out quite well. He contacted me on MSN about how he was unhappy with me getting his blog shut down. I explained to him my standpoint on soldat hackers, how they ruin the game, etc etc (I'm sure you've all seen my spiel).
A couple of days later, he asked me if he could be unbanned from the forums if he left AN (the hackers group) completely. I said maybe. After a couple more days of talking to him and going back and forth, he decided to leave completely and come back here (as The Red Guy, just to leave his previous reputation behind). He has since been completely gone from AN.
Three more AN members who I will not mention here have done the same exact thing. This thing with Louis Ex is a great example of the kind of moral victory I've been trying to achieve over the hackers. I'm not beating them by shutting down their sites, but rather by setting examples and convincing people that they're doing the wrong thing.
Here is an example of the garbage people have been trying to spread about me, EnEsCe, and many others:
http://img270.imageshack.us/img270/6961/flaxbraxyq9.gifHere are the things that are 100% false about what is said in that image:
- Fear for my reputation had nothing to do with mar77a remaining unbanned. It was simply that I didn't feel he did anything wrong enough to be punished. He was deeply sorry for what he did and he was ashamed of it. It is experiences like these that shape people into being good people. If I had banned him, what would he do with all of his knowledge and spare time, make malicious websites and hacks?
- I obviously have no problem with the "implications" of my site having used to be insecure. The whole point behind mar77a doing the security testing for me was to find bugs and holes in the site. This was a success, and I fixed the holes.
- EnEsCe never put a back door into the servers and he never abused any holes in "server admin code." The thing he used to shut down my servers was a bug in a website I created to control servers. EnEsCe has never done anything untrustworthy with the soldat server source code.
- I never mentioned any of this to the community because I've been busy with school ever since that happened. That happened on the first or second day of my college classes this year, and I haven't been able to make any official posts. As many of you have seen, I haven't been around so much and I have pushed the forum staff to "hire" many new moderators to help out around here. This thread is me making an official post about all of this.
- Again, none of this has anything to do with me and my reputation. I would gladly take a huge hit to my reputation if it meant making the forums and game better. If I was afraid for my reputation, then all of this would have been going on behind closed doors, rather than publicly in #soldat.forums. Furthermore, if this was something that I was afraid would damage my reputation, I wouldn't have banned enesce right after he shut down those servers, because I was the one who argued that he should be back in the forums and community.
- I am having MM look at EnEsCe's code before any further server versions are released, and MM will release the compiled code. I trust EnEsCe, but this will help put many other server owners to ease. I know that Chibi (from Fractured Soldat) refused to use EnEsCe's servers because he doesn't trust him. This will settle those kinds of worries
I think those were the main issues that needed to be confronted, and I hope to answer all questions that come up to the best of my ability. I really don't want this thread to get uncivilized, so please refrain from getting spammy or flamish. We've done a great job of leaving those kinds of actions behind on the old forums.
I want you all to know, and I think the previous stories support this, that I'm a very resonable person and I don't hold grudges. I think that anyone who isn't both of those should not be in a place of power, because bad things happen. Please share your honest opinions and I hope to return to the happy forums we had a month ago.
If any of you support me, feel free to post just to say that. This thread is meant to help people who are unsure about what has been going on, and it won't help them just to see people post here to argue with me.
