posts on my forum have disappeared / been interfered with - please help !

[landyvlad]

www.gsx1400owners.org

I got an email from another admin to tell me that a member 'MrErling' had ALL his posts simply disappear as if they'd never been there.

And today another member 'Tony Nitrous' has had over 2130 posts posts changed to simply "." in lieu of content.   eg http://gsx1400owners.org/forum/index.php?topic=4762.0

That can't have been done accidentally and I KNOW that my other admins wouldn't have done it.

Any idea what would cause it, and more importantly how to prevent it happening again?

Presumably a rollhback to a previous backup will be the only way to get the posts back. I can live with that.   

I just need to protect it from happening again.

HELP !!!! please

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Last Edit: Yesterday at 11:19 pm by Tony Nitrous »


That would imply they edited the post themselves.

[drewactual]

tony nitrous sure did it fast if he did it manually.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

It's really not that difficult to backtrack your own posts, and it's not like they are all edited on the same second. Even that example topic, the posts have time stamps differing by a minute on one page alone. ( Edit: 4 minutes for 2 pages, that's actually slower than I'd expect... )

[drewactual]

oh i agree it's possible.. and you're right, it's not that many.

the puzzling one is the one that disappeared as if it was never there... real strange.. almost as if the db was accessed and rooted out one particular user account's posts, which makes little sense to do unless somebody has written a script and they're using that forum as practice.  or... some sort of function like cleantalk or something, but that doesn't mess with existing accounts and posts that i know of- it just keeps suspicious posts from being made, right? 

could an operation take place that 'ignores' a particular poster where everyone has 'ignored' them?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

If that happened to me, I'd be checking the settings and logs for a) is a user able to delete their account on their own, and b) if not, did someone accidentally approve a removal request?

[shawnb61]

We recently had a bit of a rash with folks deleting their own posts & topics.  I'm not sure what set them off, but something did.

I did 2 things - set up a recycled board (which we'd never needed before) and I removed the permissions for folks to delete topics they'd started.  It really was kinda rude, in a couple cases, these had spawned lengthy threads involving many contributors covering events...

If you really fear an intruder, I'd change cpanel, db & admin passwords.  Good practice to rotate them occasionally  anyway.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Yeah, over the years I've seen similar things happen on my forum as well. People are strange sometimes.

[landyvlad]

Thanks for everyone's input. I couldn't track down the cause of the disappearing entirely post/s (it's always been set to cannot delete own posts) and for now I stopped allowing post editing by the author.


I suspect Tony's may have been done manually, but he hasn't responded to me about it at all.

I just reverted the forum back to a few days previous (with plenty of warning for members) and it's all worked out OPK in the wash.