CodeWalrus

Tonight, a former admin and co-founder of the site who had stepped down but was still trusted with root access to the server broke down and deleted the entire filesystem of the server. I had to restore a week-old backup to get it back up and running, so a lot of posts will be missing. We apologize for the trouble.

User has been permanently banned for site vandalism and multiple episodes of defamatory content (although the latter would only have resulted in 3 days of moderator preview and no IRC access if only that had occurred). If you would like to know more details about what happened, there are IRC logs available below:

#codewalrus: http://pastebin.com/k9ecpSQ0
#omnimaga: http://chat.eeems.ca/?server=irc.omnimaga.org%206667&channel=omnimaga&date=Sun%20Aug%2009%202015#1439143250483 (mirror link (http://pastebin.com/bT71ySh2))

Your walrified penguin-cat admin,
        Streetwalrus

Atleast great you fixed it soo quickly. Good work @Streetwalrus  :thumbsup:

Thank you very much, staff, for working hard to restore the site and bring back my crappy posts ;D In timely fashion, too!
'Tis a shame that this happened regardless of how fast it was fixed, though :'(

Nicely fixed :) I'm sad someone has to come to this solution though, more when they're even an ex admin.

I am afraid to say this was partly my fault. I was talking to pimath about lack of interest in the code golf on omnimaga, and the  conversation quickly changed to the lack of activity on omnimaga in general. Pimath claimed this was the fault of this website,(which I agree is partly true) and that he was naive in starting it. Although I got to say, I did not expect his grief to turn into the anger that it did.  :-\

Quote from: c4ooo on August 09, 2015, 10:06:08 PM
I am afraid to say this was partly my fault. I was talking to the staff member about lack of interest in the code golf on omnimaga, and the  conversation quickly changed to the lack of activity on omnimaga in general. The staff member claimed this was the fault of this website,(which I agree is partly true) and that he was naive in starting it. Although I got to say, I did not expect his grief to turn into the anger that it did.  :-\

It wasn't your fault at all. You didn't delete a website. Due to the fact that he quickly changed the conversation, it looked like he was looking for a reason to lash out. And it's entirely possible that people could've used both sites at the same time, if they wanted to. But the fact that people chose CW over Omnimaga said something about Omnimaga, not CW.

At least it's fixed now :-)


EDIT: Tapatalk says Omni only has 70~ followers, when I remember that it was in the thousands :/

Quote from: c4ooo on August 09, 2015, 10:06:08 PM
I am afraid to say this was partly my fault. I was talking to pimath about lack of interest in the code golf on omnimaga, and the  conversation quickly changed to the lack of activity on omnimaga in general. Pimath claimed this was the fault of this website,(which I agree is partly true) and that he was naive in starting it. Although I got to say, I did not expect his grief to turn into the anger that it did.  :-\

Don't blame yourself for this. You did not delete anything on CodeWalrus server yourself.

As for the site, it's true that it affected Omnimaga activity, but several CW members no longer felt welcome there or were unhappy about the direction Omni took since 2012 and some of the controversial admin decisions that were taken since then, especially moderation-wise starting in 2013, and were unable to adapt to the change. This often caused conflicts with admins. Certain CodeWalrus members are more active here than they were on Omni during the last year before CW was even being considered. It doesn't mean that Omnimaga is bad, but unfortunately, the members who left were by far the most active of their users and didn't want to be forced to adapt to a mentality they don't fit in. So they gave up and branched out.

Today, the remaining Omnimaga members are either people who were OK with the changes in direction or people who joined after the bulk of changes had taken place. Drama on Omnimaga has decreased considerably as a result because most remaining users are fine with administration, so if the admins there became more active on a regular basis then they could revive easily with a new userbase.

Anyway, all posts from August 2nd to 9th will have to be reposted. However, I got a backup of the statsgraph from today, so due to how it displays stats, I could manage to restore all daily posting statistics up to August 8th. I also got a backup of all walrus sprites, so I'll probably repost the ones that are missing soon.


Anyway, I'm soon gonna edit the first post of the topic with IRC logs explaining what happened and I'm gonna make a new topic soon about why CodeWalrus opened in October 2014. We were not very transparent about that when we opened so I apologize for that, but it was because it was still in the heat of the moment and we feared it would result into a massive community flame war, so we waited, but many people have figured out by now.

Oh. Wow. That is VERY suprising.

Good job street on getting everything back up though. :thumbsup: I actually thought that Omnimaga activity was increasing this past month, though. Wasn't this semi pimaths brainchild? I don't get that. But done is done, I guess.

Good job remaining admins :)

I'm still stunned from @Cumred_Snektron 's message this afternoon.

Also, we should sign up pimath at Guiness World Records for biggest pile of salt ever to be collected.

Quote from: Unicorn on August 10, 2015, 12:41:11 AM
Oh. Wow. That is VERY suprising.

Good job street on getting everything back up though. :thumbsup: I actually thought that Omnimaga activity was increasing this past month, though. Wasn't this semi pimaths brainchild? I don't get that. But done is done, I guess.

Good job remaining admins :)

Pi co-founded CW but without realizing it would hurt Omni activity this bad (even though that knowing history, a significant decrease was inevitable). He slowly became upset at this situation. He seemed like a close friend, though, and someone still interested in helping CW, which is why we didn't realize he could go that far. It was not the first time he blamed CW for this, though, but it was often done out of anger after troubles with his parents.


That said, I'll admit that I didn't know if he still had server access or not, other than his webspace. I am not in charge of server maintenance so I am not familiar with that. aeTIos probably still has webspace there too then.

Hmm, interesting. What did cumred say, @brentmaas ?

I'm fairly sure he just told him that the site was defaced by the guy, since Brentmaas hadn't been around in a while.

Ah, and BTW CW actually made me go make an omnimaga acount, because of you, DJ, and codegolf getting posted here.

Well I guess it's a good thing that you discover the rest of the community :P. Also all three sites are different in style so it's easier to find one that fits your needs more. Also pimath is not Omnimaga so a site should not be judged just for one person. But I can understand that certain comments can make people be worried.

Well yeah, of course, I wouldnt judge like that.

I doubt you would, but it's pretty common with the human race it seems. If for example  if someone attends a metal concert with 100,000 people and one person harasses him then people tend to jump to the conclusion that metal fans are bullies or that the venue administration encourages this behavior.

Yeah, that does happen. Well, we arent perfect. :P

Server vandalism is such an inappropriate and inexcusable behaviour...
pimathbrainiac has suddenly made himself many foes, and successfully ostracized himself from a significant chunk of the community, though some people at Cemetech would probably be sympathetic. And I can't see such behaviour helping Omnimaga stats grow back again.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 01:06:02 AM
That said, I'll admit that I didn't know if he still had server access or not, other than his webspace. I am not in charge of server maintenance so I am not familiar with that. aeTIos probably still has webspace there too then.

Yeah, aeTIos still has root access, though I doubt he ever logs in to the server. I'll remove his root rights but leave him with his webspace. Not that I don't trust aeTIos, but it's better to only give root access to admins.

From what happended recently, I'd say so.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on August 10, 2015, 06:42:47 AM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 01:06:02 AM
That said, I'll admit that I didn't know if he still had server access or not, other than his webspace. I am not in charge of server maintenance so I am not familiar with that. aeTIos probably still has webspace there too then.

Yeah, aeTIos still has root access, though I doubt he ever logs in to the server. I'll remove his root rights but leave him with his webspace. Not that I don't trust aeTIos, but it's better to only give root access to admins.

Yeah I agree. Various people said that it was a risky move from our part to do this. And all future staff and elite coders will have to wait before getting server access. That said, we should maybe give access to Eiyo since he has been staff (or at least part-time soon) staff in a long while.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 04:23:52 AM
I'm fairly sure he just told him that the site was defaced by the guy, since Brentmaas hadn't been around in a while.

Yeah, we're irl friends too and talk a lot on hangouts / teamspeak

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 07:03:42 AM
Yeah I agree. Various people said that it was a risky move from our part to do this. And all future staff and elite coders will have to wait before getting server access. That said, we should maybe give access to Eiyo since he has been staff (or at least part-time soon) staff in a long while.

Up until now only the original 5 have had server access. This is a privilege that requires a very strong bond of trust that both Eiyeron and aeTIos share with us, but pimath did as well. Pimath was not only a co-founder, he was our friend and we're deeply hurt that he betrayed us this way.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on August 10, 2015, 03:21:03 PM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 07:03:42 AM
Yeah I agree. Various people said that it was a risky move from our part to do this. And all future staff and elite coders will have to wait before getting server access. That said, we should maybe give access to Eiyo since he has been staff (or at least part-time soon) staff in a long while.

Up until now only the original 5 have had server access. This is a privilege that requires a very strong bond of trust that both Eiyeron and aeTIos share with us, but pimath did as well. Pimath was not only a co-founder, he was our friend and we're deeply hurt that he betrayed us this way.

Yeah I feel the same way, and it will make it even harder to trust future friends.

We received an email from pimath, he wanted part of it to be published so here it is.

Quote from: pimathI messed up drastically. Not only do I regret my actions, but I also regret my speech towards CodeWalrus, its admins, and its community. I let stress from various sources consume me and I lashed out at something I care about. I want to make it clear that I do respect CodeWalrus, its admins, its members, and its contributions to the calculator community as a whole, and that I am truly sorry for what transpired today.

That makes me wish that we had removed him from server access when he stepped down. Granted, the other thing that happened (which happened twice before to a much lower scale) would still have led to consequences but they would have been far less bad than this. Accepting apologies is something some people might do and others might do later, but it doesn't necessarily mean that pardoning (as in undoing the rule enforcement)


Although this whole ordeal has brought up another issue that goes on on CW it seems: community deities. I got the approval to ammend the forum/IRC rules about that.

Good thing he apologized, and I know, as others do that stress can be hard to manage. But still, that was the wrong thing to do.

And DJ, what are community deities?

Quote from: Unicorn on August 11, 2015, 01:05:01 AM
And DJ, what are community deities?

People in the community that certain people worships like if they were gods, often playing the victim on their behalf the minute those "deities" are reprimanded and excusing their behavior based on their coding skills. Apparently, those individuals are perfect and never do anything wrong.

HEY! Waddya know, I Am Perfect! Ive never done a thing wrong :P :trollface:

Pi has been demoted on Omni for the time being: https://www.omnimaga.org/news/welp

I guess it might be a good move for now, despite the apology, because if he remained active as staff or editor there this could reflect negatively on Omni team as a whole. But the whole incident and outcome almost reminds me of the Bryan Rabeler incident during the TI-Files era in 1998. >.<

What happened?

I wasn't alive back then after all :P

That was probably before most members here were born too. :P But yeah back then there was a bitter feud between TI-Files and Ticalc.org. At one point one staff of both sites, Bryan Rabeler, defaced TI-Files website. Later there was an apology he posted on ticalc.org then one year later he got demoted from ticalc.org staff (although probably for different reasons).

Ok, thanks.

Now I know more community history :P

(Which I think need to know some of :P )

True, it would be nice to know more. On more incwdent of crzyness. :P

Then go to http://tistory.wikidot.com :) (it has info about most past websites that existed, even some of the tiny useless ones). It even has the post stats of every TI forum since 2002.

I will go there. Someday.

And shameless advertising there DJ. :P

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that one of our member was thankful enough to send us many of the lost posts via e-mail earlier. He had notifications enabled on almost every topic. As a result, he had the posts via e-mail. I would like to thank CKH4 a lot for this.

However, due to being in a different format, it would take a long while to manually convert them and re-introducing them into the DB would require bumping all post IDs from August 9th to present, which isn't necessarily the most ideal scenario (considering the backlash Omni got for doing this, although in their case it's the entire board that got their IDs bumped, not just 100-300 posts). As a result, it is unclear yet if the posts will be re-added or simply made available as archives in a sub-domain.

It's really a shame that this happened. I'm glad that recovery was fairly painless and that most posts were able to be recovered though.

Thanks for the support. Yeah I wish that didn't happen myself. Stress for everyone and if the user had a rage fit, stress (and remorse) for him too.

I'm very sad that this happened :(

On an offtopic note, nice to see you again Catastropher :). But yeah I hope this doesn't happen again in the future.

Wow, this is awful. Sorry to hear the news.
I hope that in time, you guys can forgive pimath. The anger and frustration is completely understandable, but really, the whole thing is just sad more than anything. These things happen, sometimes people have a breakdown and then they do the most stupid things. Doesn't mean they're bad people, it just means they need help.

Yeah that will happen I think. It's just now that I guess it's hard. 400 posts in a week didn't look like much, but when I started replyinv to topics this is when I started realizing how much conttibutions were lost. I hope that pimath is feeling ok soon, though.

Indeed, I still need to bump my NAGOJI CSE topic this updates and things.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 11, 2015, 05:13:37 AM
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that one of our member was thankful enough to send us many of the lost posts via e-mail earlier. He had notifications enabled on almost every topic. As a result, he had the posts via e-mail. I would like to thank CKH4 a lot for this.

However, due to being in a different format, it would take a long while to manually convert them and re-introducing them into the DB would require bumping all post IDs from August 9th to present, which isn't necessarily the most ideal scenario (considering the backlash Omni got for doing this, although in their case it's the entire board that got their IDs bumped, not just 100-300 posts). As a result, it is unclear yet if the posts will be re-added or simply made available as archives in a sub-domain.

Just have an admin post all those as himself and then change the DB to adjust the user IDs and the timestamps, after that re-count all the posts forum-wide, that's how I did it with the yaronet posts

That's effort. :P Also you need to insert some posts between posts.

SMF always sorts by timestamps so it won't even care that the IDs are out-of-order

Oh really ? Well that's nice, but weird since threads are linked lists iirc.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on August 11, 2015, 09:36:33 PM
Oh really ? Well that's nice, but weird since threads are linked lists iirc.

All the posts are stored in {$dbprefix}messages and from there they link to the topic id they are in.

Yeah but each post has a nextpostid thing.

Quote from: Sorunome on August 11, 2015, 09:35:54 PM
SMF always sorts by timestamps so it won't even care that the IDs are out-of-order

Nah it stores by ID because when I once tried to merge two databases, dates were not taken into account when sorting from newest to oldest topic. Unless this changed in SMF 2.0?

On a side note, it seems like CKH4 was not subscribed to everything, so while those posts might get restored, some will most likely remain missing. All staff sub-forum posts will be as well except maybe up to August 4.

Darn. At least you recovered some things :)

Now everyone should suscribe to every topic possible :P

At least we got some posts back, these weeks are my most active weeks in the history of CW

EDIT
And for the CW IRC log part in post 1, I think lines 1, (25), and 26 matter the most :P

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 10, 2015, 04:23:52 AM
I'm fairly sure he just told him that the site was defaced by the guy, since Brentmaas hadn't been around in a while.

*Veeery late respond lol* It's not that I'm not much around (I'm almost daily online), it's just that the site worked for me like one hour before that.

Oh I meant prior the attack you didn't post for almost 1 month :P

Soooo, what happened??? I completely missed it O.O

Basically pimathbrainiac snapped and deleted the entire contents of the server, luckily we had a backup so we could recover, but it still happened. He could because we forgot to remove his server access when he stepped down as an admin.

That reminds me, I'm still root admin at http://z9.invisionfree.com/Omnimaga O.O

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 12, 2015, 12:14:50 AM

Quote from: Sorunome on August 11, 2015, 09:35:54 PM
SMF always sorts by timestamps so it won't even care that the IDs are out-of-order

Nah it stores by ID because when I once tried to merge two databases, dates were not taken into account when sorting from newest to oldest topic. Unless this changed in SMF 2.0?
[...]

Yeah maybe it's an SMF 2 thing

Now that I remember, smf 2 still uses IDs for sorting because if you check my Omni profile, the 2014 posts are mixed up with some of my 2013-14 posts.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on August 12, 2015, 02:48:32 PM
Basically pimathbrainiac snapped and deleted the entire contents of the server, luckily we had a backup so we could recover, but it still happened. He could because we forgot to remove his server access when he stepped down as an admin.

:'(
has Pimath left the ti community O.O

He didn't leave finally, although he is permbanned from CW now so he will only be on Omni and Cemetech. He is also no longer Omni newa editor for the time being.

Well that is sad :(

Indeed, even moreso that it was done out of anger. That said, I guess it's a better thing than someone doing it on his own or for entertainment. In such case it would have been a very bad form of trolling.

Yeah, It is always a sad thing when you have to permban some one :(

Indeed, hopefully things improve for him in the future. I understand that there was some personal frustration involved.

Some personal issues as well, although I can't really talk about pimath's private life publicly. But in the past, parents didn't help sometime and there are some old private matters threads on Omni explaining stuff. Now if anything bad happened in his life, combine that with the frustration about Omni lower activity despite his attempts at reviving it and his hard time with anger management during hard situations and bad stuff is prone to happen (although I didn't expect this). The issue, though, is that if a community figure attacks another site or even starts controversy about it then some people wrongly holds the entire site he comes from responsible. (kinda like how for example if someone visits New York and gets bullied by 1 person one night then he might claim that New York is a crime-ridden place)

Yeah, people at Omni are fine too. Just watch their reactions during CW downtime in the IRC log.

Indeed. The only issue was that one admin there that said to enjoy the c show then the next night told juju to basically cry him a river about the site attack. Thankfully, Omni later posted a news about the matter, but the other things mentioned above werr definitively not their best community relations move.

There was also someone who claims both site serves the same purpose, when it's not even remotely close to the case. If we take website mentalities into account then Omni basically serves the same purpose as Cemetech now, while CodeWalrus takes the place Omnimaga left in November 2013 or so.

QuoteIf we take website mentalities into account then Omni basically serves the same purpose as Cemetech now,

Eeems, geekboy and the Cemetech staff are good friends.

Quotewhile CodeWalrus takes the place Omnimaga left in November 2013 or so.

Yup.

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on August 20, 2015, 05:00:03 PM

QuoteIf we take website mentalities into account then Omni basically serves the same purpose as Cemetech now,

Eeems, geekboy and the Cemetech staff are good friends.

This, and geekboy is admin on both sites as well.

Not sure if someone already asked, but what's the update interval now? Just curious :P

What do you mean ?

Quote from: Streetwalrus on August 20, 2015, 05:31:40 PM

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on August 20, 2015, 05:00:03 PM

QuoteIf we take website mentalities into account then Omni basically serves the same purpose as Cemetech now,

Eeems, geekboy and the Cemetech staff are good friends.

This, and geekboy is admin on both sites as well.

Wasn't geek just global mod on Cemetech?

Maybe, I forgot but I'm pretty sure I saw something on the news about him being promoted to admin. Maybe it's just my imagination tho. :P

Community liason (officially, if an admin starts inter site drama then he intervenes to stop it.)

His other position is ASM sub-forum moderator.

EDIT: @Streetwalrus I think the confusion might come from this news https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10687 and it's probably a typo. He was promoted a few months later to Z80 ASM mod and community liason mod https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10858 and the About page says he's global mod: https://www.cemetech.net/about/index.php

Ah ok, I see.