My brother's forum was killed by a crazy lady with a grudge

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is part IMHO, part GQ, and part Pit, so I’m going to stick this in IMHO because he could use some advice on what to do.

To sum up the history behind the insanity: my brother belongs to a an RPing message board. He was even a mod at one point. He talks about it all the time- it’s a huge deal for him, and he considers the other guys there some of his best friends.
Psycho Grudge Lady has apparently been there from the start, and been getting on people’s nerves from the start. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of forum role-playing, but whatever makes you a very very bad RPer and generally annoying to be around, PGL is it. Almost every bad thing about the site turns out to have her at the root of it somewhere. Really, I’ll be talking with my brother, and he’ll mention in passing some incident such as a fight between members, or a really badly-played character, and I’ll say, “Let me guess- PGL?” And he’ll say yes, of course.
Last year things came to a head, the board almost split because of her, and (to almost everyone’s relief) she finally got got kicked out. That’s when she went from merely aggravating to kinda scary nuts obsessive.
PGL has been spending her time since going around bad-mouthing my brother’s site on the internet. They don’t think they’ve found all of her rantings, but she has, for example, gone around on the huge GameFaqs site trying to discourage new people from joining. She also made her own forum, and keeps trying to start up board wars between the two. (At one point, she IP-banned everyone on her forum who also belonged to my brother’s forum). Also, she once vandalized their board wiki under the name “Hermann Goering”. This last one didn’t really bother them as much as the rest, but I think it maybe says something about her mental state.
Well, tonight she’s gone a step above plain harassment, and taken down their whole site. I’m not sure I fully follow the details, but a rather naive mod or admin tried to contact someone through her for some reason, and she ended up with the contact info of the site’s root admin, who hadn’t been around for a few years (“and he’s dumb enough to believe what she tells him”, Bro says) and she sent him an email saying that the site was… well, don’t know what exactly she said. The message from the root admin guy said something about the site being “out of control”, whatever that means. Anyway, Mr. Root simply deleted the whole site.

My brother is in an awful state, and I want to help him out in any way I can.

So:

GQish- Is there any way to recover something from their site? I think I remember hearing about programs that can recover deleted webpages. I do not know anything about computer science myself. As far as I’m concerned, the whole World Wide Web runs on pixie dust.

IMHOish- What would you advise my brother and his friends to do? I’m worried that if they just get a new site, Crazy Lady is going to find them, follow them, and do something else crazy. Is there some way to get rid of her for good? Or to PGL-proof the forum? Besides having less-gullible mods? (Said mod is getting ripped a new one by the rest of the members in their still-working chat box. He seems to think they’re unreasonable in being mad at him). Could they benefit from teaming up with the soon-to-be-former members of PGL’s board? (Bro says it looks like her horrified members are planning to leave en masse some time soon. If they set up their own board, PGL is unlikely to leave them alone in a fit of reason).

Pitish- …

…

…

I have no words here. None that are repeatable in polite company, anyway.

2

  1. This sounds remarkably unpleasant. I wonder if any statutes have been violated by the PGL.
    I also wonder if the appellation ‘Lady’ is appropriate.

  2. A snapshot of the webpage contents may be cached somewhere by a bot-net. The problem with that is determining who has the cache. I’d also recommend contacting the domain provider. It is entirely possible that the whole site (databases included) was backed up sometime relatively recently to guard against catastrophic hardware failure.

  3. Pitwise, I certainly feel your brother’s pain. Sometimes, words just don’t do justice to injustice.

3

If it was a forum, then it was using a database. All that should be needed is a reinstall of the forum/website software, and a database restore.

However, it really depends what the admin did - he may have deleted the site virtual host record, killing the site but not deleting any actual data. It could even just be the DNS records that have gone. There is just not enough detail to know.

Get more details of what was done, and of what remains (backups, etc).

Si

4

It’s possible to make a forum be invitation only. The SDMB is open to just about everyone, other than people who have been IP banned, though we do use some anti-bot precautions.

I’d suggest that your brother (and any other interested parties) start up a new board, and only invite the regulars (other than PGL) at first. They could have a welcome screen, saying that the old group has found a new home at the new board, and they are starting everyone fresh, but it’s invitation only. Have an email address (get a free email account for this) to send applications to, and have all the mods have access to this account. If PGL finds this account and starts spamming or harassing the mods, just change the account. The mods should send out invitations to every good player from the old boards. If PGL asks to be admitted, she should be told once that she is not welcome. Then just delete any further emails from her. She doesn’t have a right to be on the boards.

Mr. Root doesn’t get an invite, either, although he should probably be allowed to join.

5

It sounds like there are two issues: recovering old data, and getting the board back on-line. Were you a paying customer of your old server/host, or was it free because of ads?

I have my own little hobby site. I used to have it hosted for free but paid hosting is much much better. (And I have one tiny ad on the site which more than pays for the modest hosting charge.)

I think it’s almost certain your old host will have a copy of all your data (perhaps with a few most recent messages lost). I’d hope they’d feel obligated to send you that, even if they opt not to reinstate your board. (But my experience with my old “free” website is that the host took a week or more just to respond to e-mail.)

6

My brother doesn’t know the technical details of what happened; he’s going to try to find someone in the chat who might know what’s what.

They only need to recover the data, because they’re moving to a new forum anyway.

They can’t make the forum invite only because they want to have new people able to join.

The server is free and runs on ads.

Update on the crazy: PGL has found the new site they’re moving to. Within the time it took me to write the last post and get ready for bed, actually. She showed up to rant about (a) how she was perfectly justified in getting them shut down, because they were spying on her, and (b) how she didn’t do it, they’re all lying. With no apparent sense of irony.

I found out the rough sequence of events from last night:

There are people on both forums (I’ll call them Old Board and New Board for the sake of ease) who are covertly friends with one another. (Covertly from the PGL, anyway. The OB people coudln’t care less).

When the Old Board found their site missing, and the gullible admin found an email from the root person saying why, they told their New Board friends.

The NB people confronted PGL. PGL denied it at first, but they brought in some sort of proof. The New Board members went up in arms. This was going too far for them.

PGL found the new site the OB was regrouping at, and accused them of spying on her. The Old Board was apparently “unjust” in some way, and she was a crusader for justice putting things to rights. Also, she didn’t do it.

The Old Board is currently negotiating with the Unreasonable Root Admin.

Thanks for your advice and support.

7

Having the board be invite-only doesn’t mean that newbies can’t join.

All it means is that if someone wants to join, they have to take a couple of extra steps - send an email and ask to join, and let a mod or admin check their IP to make sure they’re not trolls or PGL socks, and then when they check out, send them their link with permission to join up. I’m on several boards which operate this way, and none of them have ever taken more than a couple of days to process.

I know it sounds a bit more complicated, but if your brother has a crazy internet stalker psycho, then it’s justified to make their lives more peaceful.

8

They don’t have to make the entire thing private. They can have an open area for new people to post and only invite them to the private area after a set amount of time. They can call the open area the Marketplace and the private area the Forbidden City. Or something. There’s any number of RP reasons they can come up with for the divide.

9

As far as why she’s finding their new websites so quickly, you might consider that someone on the Old Board is passing her information. A *lot *of people secretly love this kind of drama, especially in the RP community. I played World of Warcraft on a PVP-RP server for years, and the whole RP community is naturally rife with drama and overwhelmingly populated by the mentally ill and/or socially-deficient. Not to say that social, mentally healthy, and happy people can’t be in the community (and I don’t know your brother, so who the heck knows), but they’re a minority by far. Your brother might be happier if he started HIS OWN board, and kept it private/by invitation only. That way, it doesn’t matter if she finds them or not, she can’t post either way.

10

How can an admin delete a forum he doesn’t own, morally or legally? Sure, he has rights by reason it’s his hardware. He’s within his rights to shut a forum down if there are shenanigans going on, but the bits on the disk are not his intellectual property to delete at will.

Has Bro figured out if the admin went scorched disk, or just lights out?

11

With the recent crackdowns on illegal file-sharing I can certainly see how the site owner might choose to pull the plug if such accusations were made, and they can hardly sit and read through thousands of posts first to make sure there is no copyrighted content.

12

I’ll broach the subject.

I suppose. But the new place they’re hanging out at belongs to an Old Board member, so maybe everyone knows so-and-so has this website, in which case I wouldn’t be surprised that she found them.

Again, I’ll broach the subject.

Not that last I heard, no.

13

Sounds like somebody needs to be the subject of a lawsuit.

The admin for illegally deleting someone else’s website, and the crazy lady needs some sort of harassment injunction or other court order (whatever your jurisdiction offers).

Finally, your brother needs to ensure he has control of his own website and that the root controls aren’t held by someone crazy enough to delete his website because some crazy lady sent him an email.

14

I meant “his site” as in a website he belongs to, not one that he’s in charge of. I don’t think he’s even a mod anymore.

And yeah, he says that everyone knew that [Member] had another site, it wasn’t too surprising that PGL found it.

15

If getting the data back from the original host is impossible they might try the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If the site was able to be indexed it probably has snapshots of the content. As a last resort that could be copied/pasted into new posts at the new site to recover some of the lost data.

16

A lawsuit would be pointless, expensive, and a waste of time. If there’s no value in the content of the old board, move on with the new one. Unless you were making money here there are no damages to award.

It’s not hard to keep malcontents off a board without resorting to keeping the whole thing private. There are many settings, restrictions, and safeguards to keep unwanted folks off the boards, or at minimum, reduce the amount of annoyance they will be. Have your brother learn the ins and outs of the software they plan on using and he’ll be fine. If he wants suggestions, I’m sure the members here can provide them.

17

Depends on the site and its size.

18

Pretty sure that they are, legally.

If I own a hard drive, I can wipe it clean. If you have some prior arrangement with me to keep some data of yours on that drive, then you may be able to sue me over the breach of contract and get damages, but that would depend on the contract. If I owned a chalkboard and you drew a picture on it, would I have to consult with you before I erased it?

“Intellectual property” is a vague term, but it usually refers to copyright, trademark, patents, and other legal frameworks that prevent people from using data, marks, or designs created by others from being used without their permission. There aren’t any laws that I know of that say you can’t delete or destroy information on a medium that you own.

19

Like you said, and I implied, depends on the contract. The forum owner most assuredly was paying for disk space and processor time even if the forum itself was open to all comers at no charge. There would be a breach of contract if the forum was scrubbed, less so if just shut down but otherwise intact. The second case would not be a big deal if the data was recovered, because the OP said they were going to change hosts anyway.

20

Where are you getting this “owned the hard drive” premise from? There’s no indication that the admin in question owned the server upon which the site was located.

Admin != Owner. He’s someone (either a volunteer or employee) the owner gave powers to run the site; but unless we’re in bizarro-world, certainly not authority to delete it.

You don’t own a hard drive just because someone gives you the password for it. Your conduct is still governed by legal, ethical, and moral rules.

And even IF that admin happened to own the equipment, he’s still under an obligation to fulfil his agreement which -at the very least - would have been “don’t delete this site on a whim”.