Ok in thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=38013 CKDextHavn refers to MJH directly after the first ghost post.
Is this a reference to a previous poster which I don’t get or is MJH the other ghost ?
Does anybody know of a poster called this or has a name that could be shortened to this .
btw it’s 4:10am here and nothing on t.v. so I’ve nothing else to do .
Breaks out spare hat . Here ya go KeithT now we both have one 
Thanks for the hat, yojimbo! Even though I’m more of a drug-free Shaggy type…
Anyway, this link is a bit of a doozy…
…but it is the search result for all posts by user MJH.(not an abbreviation, BTW)
Our ghosts are thus MJH (user #8938) and niveous (user #9495).
QED
(They would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for us meddling kids! :D)
A drug free Shaggy . What are you talking about man .
I’d rather Shaggy’s drugs than a 3% solution anyway 
. Now where did I hid those “snacks” .
It doesn’t seem so strange to me. Just a day or two ago I registered at vBulletin’s message board but decided not to post anything after all.
No, bib, the the software says I’ve specified an invalid user or something along those lines. Definitely an error message, not just a search that turned up nothing.
This post in Great Debates is by MJH with no name and a reg date of Dec 1969. It so happens that I remember posting right after that post. And the post I did is now missing. Does anyone know whether there is a missing post after the other ones mentioned above?
One theory might be field displacement. I’ve seen it happen before, where a “confused” database engine offsets the fields by one or more places. When the data is read, the field that is normally queried for whatever operation might now be the wrong data type or contain some sort of nonsense “data” so that the operation fails. Normal operations might pick up with the next valid record if errors are trapped.
The 12/69 date most likely has something to do with the epoch on the Red Hat Linux system on which the SDMB is running. The epoch is the time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system’s clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970.
Anyone who knows UNIX or Linux is saying “Well, duh,” but no one has mentioned the epoch angle yet on this thread, so I thought I’d chime in. Whether this is an indication that the SDMB’s vBulletin software has a bug or the SDMB is being hacked, I have no idea.
(I tuned in to this thread because a ghost poster contributed to the thread I started, coincidentally, with my first SDMB posting.)
I think the reason that you can’t do a search is because there’s no name. If you were to click on the search button below this post, the url would look like this (spaces added so it fits on the screen):
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/search.php? action=simplesearch&exactname=yes&searchuser=waterj2
Since the ghost poster has no name, the search won’t work.
We’re investigating and we’re getting Jerry on it soonest.
I’ll let you know what we find when we find it.
Please report any further oddities to this thread. Besides the usual ones, I mean. 
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I noticed this last night, but didn’t post anything about it, for fear that it was a hack… don’t want to give anyone any ideas. The ghost poster appears to usually be MJH, who had a normal existance before last night, and it’s probably a glitch. As to whether it can be exploited, who knows.
You win the prize. That’s EXACTLY what happened.
Somehow the database got corrupted.
We got it fixed, we’re back in business, nothing else to see here, thankyouverymuch . . .
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Meanwhile, he seems to have started using the name MJH2, after finding that his name wasn’t working. One of the mods ought to drop him a line (he has his e-mail address disabled) to tell him it’s fixed.
See, this is why we need database finance reform. If those special interests were prevented from throwing huge sums of money at databases, we’d stop finding them nude in the hot tub with 12 hookers and maybe they’d actually start remembering stuff.
But are Woodface and Shrub (come to thing of it, nice woodland theme we’ve got going this election) gonna do anything about this? No, they’d rather argue about subliminal messages and who invented the Internet. Sheesh.