I was browsing General Questions earlier today, and I clicked on a thread that led me to a “You do not have permission to view this page” page (obviously generated by vBulletin, not some sort of proxy error or anything like that). I can’t remember what the thread title was, and when I go back to the General Questions page, I don’t see a thread with that ID (based on hovering over the thread links and looking at the threadid parameter). What’s special about this thread? Just curious…
It was probably moved to a forum that you do not have access to. Sometimes troublesome threads are moved out of public view rather than deleted. It was probably moved between the time you saw it on the list, and clicked on it.
…and right now, they’re contemplating what to do about this breach of security, much like when the lost hikers in the jungle stumble upon a giant, nameless concrete structure, and they knock on the door to ask for a map.
For your own safety, when browsing the SDMB, do not look directly at the screen until it is determined that the super-secret ModRay is not screaming out of your monitor, looking to latch onto the nearest human retina and burn the initials “CA” into it.
People like me can die from unsatisfied curiosity, you know! It eats away at us until it turns our bones to jelly and our brains to . . . uh . . . more jelly. No, worse - jelly mush. Can you imagine anything more pathetic than mushed jelly?
Do you really want to see a forum full of locked threads (so you can’t comment to them), each ending with either a flame war or the meltdown of a member? I have access to one of those on another board; it’s depressing!
Now the private moderators’ forum, where they discuss us behind our backs – that one I’d like to see!
Weird. I just did a search for threads I’ve participated in in the past month (exact name = “ntucker”, within last month, any forum), and this thread showed up, with the last poster listed as “yummy-juice_25” on 02-22-2003 at 05:46 AM (PST), but when I opened the thread, there was no such post. What’s that about?
And, of course, I unwittingly destroyed the reproducibility of this phenomenon by posting to this thread. Oops. Regardless, a search for posts by user “yummy-juice_25” turns up nothing. Maybe this was an obviously abusive new user who was simply wiped out without a trace, rather than converted to “banned” status…
Basically, yummy was a spammer (or, to be more precise, a spamming 'bot) that posted a porn link in around two dozen threads. We banned the ID and deleted all its posts in a mass delete, which has the awkward side effect that his name (may it be cursed through all eternity) still appears as “last poster” but the post has been vanished.
I remember that before the upgrade, there were also a number of “zombie” forums that had a few posts that were viewable (I think most were just HTML tests and the like), but nothing could be done there. Several of these forums existed, and were exactly identical. Spooky!
I want to see it all - no fair, no fair!