What happened, what we know, what we don't know

As promised here's my take:

So let me start by saying there are certain things that I can't publicly share because there's some stuff we're really not sure about and I don't want to make anything worse.

So, as they say in The Sound of Music, let's start from the very beginning, in this case the beginning of the incident.

On Oct. 19th I was chatting with some folks on Discord - we love Discord - about old school ATS personalities and threads. I shared a link to a 20 year old thread and everyone had a good laugh and some memories, but as the lone ATS staffer chatting I noticed something was wrong. Without getting too specific, if you're looking at a thread you can see each person's mini profile and there's a little picture of a guy that opens a drop down where you can send a u2u among things. Well, staff have another drop down next to the little person, which drops down features like removing a post, warning, applaud and some other stuff. I noticed that mine had vanished. Then I noticed I could not access the staff forums, like the Complaints forum for example. All gone.

I pinged some other mods and they experienced the same thing. Additionally we found it pretty weird that there had not been a new post on ATS in close to 2 hours. Yes, traffic is not what it was 15 years ago, but two hours with no post... nah... something is off. At this point the folks on Discord were being pretty helpful with seeing what was going on and we noticed none of us could post anything, it would just submit and spin, never actually post.

Next step? Well, like most IT things reboot right? We had a volunteer sign off and try signing back on. Signing off worked great! Back on, not so much. Password didn't work. Ok, we have a mechanism in place if you forget your password, just get a reset emailed to you. NOPE. No email.

Ok... this is insanity, never seen this before. So, someone tried making a new account to post. Worked like a charm. New name, new password, able to post, all is well. Essentially what we had was ALL existing accounts had been "scrambled" so new accounts were required.

Things got ugly. At the beginning it was mostly freaked out members registering new names and trying to figure out what's up. That lasted a day or so. After that we had a massive influx of new members, some were fine but there was a fairly large group posting adult material, obscenities, vile things about other members, links to dangerous sites and of course tons of spam.

You may say ATS has faced those things before and we have a bunch of mods who can trash those threads and ban the members. Well, no. There was no staff. We were locked out with everyone else. So, when reading the above paragraph and realizing there was no staff you can see why I used the term ugly.

So how did we get to where we are now? How am I back on my name? Interesting story... We've got a friend. Said friend is good with computers and was able to look into what happened to us. We were told that the database that holds members' passwords was non functional, as was the database that holds members' emails. So that is why passwords did not work as well as the password reset emails. Both were toast. Let me clarify immediately that we do not know if the damage to those databases was intentional or not.

Our friend is knowledgeable in computer systems and was able to restore access to myself and DTOM. Please do not ask me questions about how this was done. I've been very up front with everyone here that I am the community guy, not the tech guy. You may as well ask me about dark matter and black holes. My answer is I don't know. Honestly I don't care either. What mattered is that DTOM and I were back on.

Why are we important? Because our accounts have the ability to re-assign ATS accounts to email addresses. So no, I can't change passwords, but I can register your account to a new email address and have it send you a typical forgot password message.

By getting the two of us back on we were able to begin to help members back online. I've personally gotten over 200 members back online myself and I know DTOM has done a bunch as well in addition to cleaning the filth of the last week. I don't envy her that task.

Where do we go from here? Well, if I'm being honest, I don't know. I don't know if this can happen again. I don't know how fragile these databases are and I don't have the access or knowledge necessary to fix them. I also don't know if there are other vulnerabilities at large so I implore all of you not to post anything private even in u2us.

I had taken a step back from things here over some issues that I really don't want to get into out of respect for others involved (whether or not that respect is reciprocated) but I could not sit and watch a community I love "go out like that." It was too much to stomach. I'm here doing the best I can to help this community, all issues aside. As are some of the other staff. We will continue to do that as long as things are working well enough to do so.

I ask that people be patient with the small group of us that's working on this. There's a very limited number of people who have the access necessary to redo the email assignment and password reminder. It's gonna take time.

I thank the gentleman who assisted us getting back online to be able to help our members. This person owed us nothing and nonetheless used his technical knowledge to give us a chance to help our members. I thank DTOM for cleaning up the unfortunate mess of posts that were made during the last week. I thank the folks on my Discord who were helpful to me when I was being absolutely bombarded with requests for assistance.

I genuinely do not believe any community besides ATS would have survived the last week in any manner. The world has changed, message boards are no longer what they were, there may be less of us, but we've seen that the love of the community persists. Not love of a software platform, not love of data, but the community. That's the only reason I'm here and that's the reason I've felt OBLIGATED to share what I know with all of you.

I can attempt to answer questions posed, but honestly I've given you what I know. For all I know the site may collapse again tomorrow but I want it known that there are people here who give a damn and if it does come to an end soon (I don't know, just speculation and worry) at least let it come to an end with respect befitting the site Simon founded in 1997.

I thank you all for reading this and being patient.

a reply to: Djarums

thanks for everything . you and the rest of the mod team.

and that special someone who found the keys.

we survive one more day

So we should be spending this borrowed time we currently have to archive everything we can, instead of asking questions about what happened. These "Super Mods" and "Friend" will fill us in as more defined facts are known.

Thank you and all involved.

a reply to: Guyfriday
thats is being worked on i believe , you might try discord to see whats going on


some wont go down without at least a good fight to save what can be saved

Outstanding to know you, DTOM, and others are working to preserve our place.
Hopefully someday I can recover my original account.
Thanks for what you do.

I remember that night. Because I had just finished watching a movie/drama about the 1st century Christians in Jerusalem and the prophecy of Jesus telling them when they see Jerusalem surrounded by encamped armies to flee to the mountains. The drama came to mind because of the war and acts of terrorism happening in Israel and Palestine right now. (Not saying they are parallel, they are not). So logged in to write a post on one of my threads and couldn't. After a while of thinking I understood what was going on. And I cautiously made another account and posted the link to the drama. Haha, just reread it and I wrote this: "Something to pass the time while they try and figure out if they can get the passwords back."

I'm with another member here who wrote a thread earlier asking how we can be sure anyone with a reset email is who they claim to be. And on the other hand, that makes me want to reset my other account just so no one does claim it for whatever reason for themselves.

a reply to: Djarums


Thank you Djarums and DOTM for everything you have done and continue to do!

And many thanks to you special guy for all the help to gave them.

Here here! We'll be here for whatever is next. We'll see how this situation evolves, but for now lets just enjoy it while we can!

Btw, if we do actually hear back from the owners at some point, tell them the ATS community agrees that they need to give you guys "and that special individual" a fat stack of cash! This place would have been raided by the feds by Thanksgiving had that not happened, so they would have been giving that cash to lawyers and government anyways!

To add to a statement made above:

If you have stuff in your upload folder it might be wise to download them and save elsewhere.

Keep in mind this was from a time that storage was a premium and nowadays we all have icloud or onedrive etc.

Get it off there and put it on your own product. Losing access to data, even when it's old, sucks.

a reply to: Djarums

A Perfect Precise Explanation . Thank You .....

Thankyou ATS Super Hero administrators for taking the initiative to keep the ATS community functioning and together! I'm sure most of us do not comprehend the large amount of effort you're putting into re-connecting members.

Thankyou Again!

Were the owners aware of what was happening? I know there were a bunch of darko’s one in particular mrs darko which had some believing she was real. I assume these were all fake accounts? Just curious if the real owners knew the titanic was sinking.

a reply to: NeonKnights

all fake accounts.. all i believe.. everyone who was supposed to be in control are mia

originally posted by: Another_Nut
a reply to: NeonKnights

all fake accounts.. all i believe.. everyone who was supposed to be in control are mia

Yeah I figured, some were certainly more telling than others lol. They’re still mia? That’s really strange. Thx

a reply to: Djarums

Not buying it.

Databases are password protected.

In order to reset the Mods' passwords, someone had to have the database password.

Mods don't have that password. That's something an owner and his delegated IT team would have.

There doesn't seem to be an owner or IT team present.

Sounds to me like someone got ransomwared, and someone paid just enough to have a couple logins decrypted.

That, or Djarums and Don't Tread On Me are the new owners.

Probably both, tbh.

a reply to: ashisnotanidiot

wouldnt call it a "team" lol but there was outside help, as djarum stated, to regain access.

You dont have to believe but i will vouch for the truthfulness of what happened ... Many of us were on discord as it unfolded.

originally posted by: Another_Nut
a reply to: ashisnotanidiot

wouldnt call it a "team" lol but there was outside help, as djarum stated, to regain access.

You dont have to believe but i will vouch for the truthfulness of what happened ... Many of us were on discord as it unfolded.

He has a point to a certain extent. The username MrsDarko said that there were posts that had been removed they were trying to recover and when looking at her profile page it linked to a thread that had been 404d (a thread that was authored in April long before her account became active). I look at thread numbers before it and after it, and after that thread number a whole swath of threads had been "removed." But later some of these were showing. And also that username had an applause on it. So the user had inside information about what was going on. And someone had access to give it an applause. So there is more to the story than what was said in the OP. Someone is active with information behind the scenes. Also my U2Us were hacked on the new account I made. So there was someone active with that ability as well.

This past week has seen the good, the bad and the ugly but this right here shows the real good in this community. Well done indeed!