Originally Posted by Hatamoto
To be clear:
A few weeks ago, the servers were disabled at the host. After a trouble ticket was submitted, the host said the servers were disabled due to "possible identity theft".
Jait, Skiff and I all provided information to the host to prove we were who we said we were. The only person who didn't was Shibby, who said he was going off for a "family visit" and he'd look into it when he got back.
During that 'family visit", the email contact at the host was changed to an email of, yes, one of his family members. Then our access to the control panel was cut off, but not before we were able to see the new email address and the IP address associated with the last login, an IP that matched up with an account that Shibby had personally interceded on several years ago... which is weird, because across the years his personal intervention in any matter was exceptionally rare.
The sites remained down, and Shibby kept deflecting, kept heel-dragging as to why he wouldn't contact the host to get things resolved. After all, he was the person tasked with paying the bills, he could easily have mailed them with invoice numbers and bank details and said "We are the real deal, please release control to us."
Which, apparently, he did. Except not to us, but to himself. And that's when the rest of us were cut off. Then he did the same at the domain registrars.
At that point what we had suspected had been more or less confirmed: this wasn't some hack, some 'horrible misunderstanding', it was a hostile takeover. So we did what anyone on the internet does when faced with breakage: we routed around it. It took several days and a whole bunch of late nights, but we got theClickGroup up and operational, and here we are.
Meanwhile, Shibby tries desperately to get the .bz sites operational and apparently is having extreme difficulties maintaining operation of a system that, when I'd last left it, was not only largely self-running but self-starting. I don't what they're doing to the databases there but I've seen more reports of db errors there in a week than have happened in several years that I was tending the shop. Literally his first and second acts as Grand Poobah of All The Bz was first to promote himself and his friend Albert, and then to disable all the existing staff. The weird database issues and his inclusion of 3rd parties into looking at codebase and data is why we tell everyone to change their passwords, not just at .click and (if you still have access) at .bz, but any other site you might have used that password at.
Meanwhile, not only we have been continuously trying to contact him to find out what the hell his game plan is, but various admins and mods have as well. He either flat out ignores or rebuffs them, or he sets up plans that he doesn't follow through on. At the end of the day, there's no indication that he's interested in either being honest with people, nor in 'reconciliation' in the interest of his decade-long personal relationships with the rest of the team, nor of the users.
At this point, there's not much more that can be done aside from letting people know what happened at .bz, the nature of the person(s) running the show there now, and moving on. You might try to appeal against splitting over there, but I wouldn't count on your account remaining active if you try... apparently there's a policy of disabling anyone who makes a reference to .click in forums or pms there.
