SHOCKER!!! Yak out, replaced by Zidonuke. Also: Russia Blocks FA

[Conan]

After 8 years of getting very little done, it was announced today that Yak is no longer the "Tech Ops Lead", and is now simply listed as "Elder Dev" on the updated staff page, which has been updated to reflect this change, and only this change (Sciggles' and Chase's abandoned admin accounts are still listed.)

The new "Tech Team Lead", an obvious sockpuppet account called "starrykitten", describes themselves as "a Systems Engineer, developing, and maintaining one of the worlds largest IT infrastructures". The account was registered on November 8th, and a fresh new Twitter account is linked to from their page. Of course, being FA, their mysterious new administrator is being brought on board to, and I quote, "bring more transparency to what we're doing". They describe themselves in the comments as a "personal friend of Dragoneer" (Oh, because that has worked out so well in the past) and that they're keeping their identity a secret because they want to "shield [their] friends and loved ones from the typical drama that exists in this community".

You can't make this shit up.

Something worth noting in the new person's profile is a line at the very bottom:
 

PS: I do not work on Phoenix, I never will...

For someone who describes their job as "responsible for staying on top of all bug report tickets...", you'd think that would mean that, once Phoenix is ready, they'd be responsible of maintaining that. Could this be another sign that FA has given up on Phoenix? Further, when asked about Phoenix, the new person simply said "Meh." before linking to the GitHub.

FA has also published a public "bug/dev tracker", which contains some great insights on the current status of their clusterfuck of a website. Remember in early 2013, when FA bought two identical database servers, sat on them for a number of months before getting one running which Yak promptly fucked up last December and "fixed" it by moving everything on to the unused server? Well, nearly a year later and they STILL HAVE NOT SET UP THE SLAVE SERVER. There is a box, that they have had since the spring of 2013, sitting in their rack, presumably running, doing nothing. But they totally can be trusted with more servers and $20k, guys, honest!.

More amusing, it appears they want to set up the redundancy so they can set up the site to essentially dedicate the slave server to the completely fucked up notifications system.

Perhaps the most entertaining thing, however, is a recent discovery that parts of FA have been blocked in Russia. Naturally, Dragoneer makes claims suggesting this is something he can "fix".

We've been notified that Russia is partially blocking one of FA's content server (d.facdn.net) which is preventing a good number of users from viewing images on the site. We're looking into getting the site unblocked and restoring access for the Russian furry community. In the mean time, we suggest using a VPN or proxy service to access the site if you are able.

You are now imagining Dragoneer writing a letter to the Russian Embassy. "Dear Russians, please unblock my furry porn website. Love, Dragoneer."

One "fix" suggested in the dev tracker: a proxy service. Yeah, good luck with that one.

Now taking bets as to how long it takes for this person to get fed up and quit.

[nrr]

The new "Tech Team Lead", an obvious sockpuppet account called "starrykitten", describes themselves as "a Systems Engineer, developing, and maintaining one of the worlds largest IT infrastructures".

Oh, this is going to be fun.

Now taking bets as to how long it takes for this person to get fed up and quit.

Fuck that. I'm taking bets as to how long it takes for this individual to give up on being friends with Dragoneer.

[an hoopoe]

Here's some exchange which took place between Starrykitten and an FA user where starrykitten reveals that the two servers purchased last year have been sitting idle until now:

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43149324

For almost the past year and a half FA was in a maintenance only mode development wise. The devs could only dedicate a small amount of time like 1-4 hours a week for FA, They all have real lives and jobs to deal with that made it impossible to find time to work on that. We are all unpaid volunteers so other stuff always comes first. The hardware itself was truly needed but from what I've been reading in the chat log of the tech staff is that the effort required was too great to get done within the small time windows they had available. Stopping midway in the process would of resulted in downtime. Anyways yes, Jake has been sitting idle for almost a year, and it was constantly talked about internally. With that said, I'm pretty much alone on the majority of new development efforts and broad fixes. I'm putting almost all of my free time into FA now. Please just keep an eye on my tracker and I'm getting to things as fast as humanly possible.

Also if anyone wants me to work on FA full time, every waking hour of my life I demand a salary of 122k. At least that is how much my current company values me at 40 hours a week.

I don't care if people won't know who I really am, at the end of the day I don't owe anyone anything in that regard. I think its just a matter of fact that jake has been idle, we shouldn't shy away from that... I'm trying to make this into a turning point and actually get something done around here. Maybe after I've actually proved myself and got a few achievements under my belt I'll tell the community who I really am.

Someone on lulz.net had this context to add:

"Finn" and "Jake" are the two servers they bought in the last server donation drive... in early 2013.

This replication should have been set up A YEAR AGO. They have had an idle server sitting there for more than A YEAR. People BOUGHT THEM THIS SERVER and it's already gone more than a year doing NOTHING. Probably 1/3 of it's useful life has been sitting there doing nothing

Starrykitten said, in response to someone asking about the $20k in recent donations:

The money was used to pay for tax bills that FA caused and ensure FA's stays online by paying the 2.5k a monthly server bill. If anything its likely sitting in a account since FA can go months without getting more than 100-200 dollars a month from the ad stuff. Finally the rest is stored for paying for the new cloud services we are adopting. Once we can get out of the current provider I have already lined up a entire new operation that runs on dedicated servers for only 1k a month and are actually from 2014 in a reputable ISP. As far as the finer details I don't even know whats going on and just like everyone else here I'm eagerly awaiting the transparency into peoples donations.

As far as myself, I would rather say fuck it and quit than out myself right now before I'm ready.

On Trello, Dragoneer wants more hardware:

https://trello.com/c/hsundUSx

I have multiple Xeon procs (new) which were donated to FA, and we have the funds available to make 4TB drives appear. We can easily invest in two new storage servers (redundancy, redundancy, redundancy!) to add storage.

[an hoopoe]

It's been stated on lulz.net: https://lulz.net/furi/res/3032823.html#3033961

that one Zidonuke is Starrykitten. Zidonuke has the qualifications of being from Dragoneer and Net-cat's social circle and of having worked as a programmer on F-list where he spied on the users of the site and put backdoors into the site to screw up it's database after he was discovered:

Zidonuke, our most recent new coder, had been abusing his admin and coding access to F-List to spy on users. When he was found out, he used several backdoors he had previously put into the site to cause havoc in the site's database -- by promoting every user to admin status and removing bans from every banned user. As a safety measure in the event he left any more backdoors, the F-List server was then completely wiped and re-built. The database was restored from backup. We should now be back to how everything was running before the incident (more or less). Your passwords have been reset to what they were on January 28th during the database restore. If you changed it since then, use your old one to log in."

^
https://www.f-list.net/newspost/158/

[ohboyherewego]

It's been stated on lulz.net: https://lulz.net/furi/res/3032823.html#3033961

that one Zidonuke is Starrykitten. Zidonuke has the qualifications of being from Dragoneer and Net-cat's social circle and of having worked as a programmer on F-list where he spied on the users of the site and put backdoors into the site to screw up it's database after he was discovered:

Zidonuke, our most recent new coder, had been abusing his admin and coding access to F-List to spy on users. When he was found out, he used several backdoors he had previously put into the site to cause havoc in the site's database -- by promoting every user to admin status and removing bans from every banned user. As a safety measure in the event he left any more backdoors, the F-List server was then completely wiped and re-built. The database was restored from backup. We should now be back to how everything was running before the incident (more or less). Your passwords have been reset to what they were on January 28th during the database restore. If you changed it since then, use your old one to log in."

^
https://www.f-list.net/newspost/158/

http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/starrybound-server-1-2-an-advanced-server-wrapper-for-starbound-spawn-protection.58969/

>Starrybound

[Kindrift]

I've decided we're going to be pulling this mod from the official repository and officially telling people to stay away from it. Here are the reasons why.

• Zidonuke (one of the major contributors to this mod) was involved in an unofficial release of the minecraft tool bukkit. Which gave him backdoor access to other people's servers, which he then used to ban admins from their own servers. https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/mcblock-it.65593/ || http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNNJys6H0gE
• Zidonuke became staff on a forum called the f-list, he used his position to read users private messages. Eventually he admined everyone on the site and cleared the ban list. Essentially destroying the forums. https://www.f-list.net/newspost/158/
• Zidonuke hopped onto another little project called PWO ( Pokemon World Online ). He was made a developer, and deleted PWO's data and server-side coding due to being frustrated with criticism from the community. He deleted the game and it's databases, released everyones passwords/usernames, etc. http://iblamelee.co.uk/pwo/wiki/index.php?title=Pok%C3%A9mon_World_Online
• Crashdoom was the developer of a minecraft mod called MCBans. At one point a player called Doridian gained access rights he shouldn't have had that allowed him to ban players from their own servers. Doridian is Zidonukes partner.
• Crashdoom + Zido distributed a client for minecraft called yiffcraft, that was essentially a hacked/griefing client for minecraft. Crashdoom claims his account was hacked and the hacker used his account to distribute the client. However, that seems less and less likely with Zidonuke involved.
• Crashdoom is a frequent poster on hacking forums
• There has been speculation that crashdoom, zidonuke and doridian are all the same person.
• Zidonuke / Doridian caused similar drama with 'tshock' a similar mod for Terraria. http://www.terrariaonline.com/threads/if-youre-using-tmod-or-know-someone-who-is-read-this-immediately.34616/
• Crashdoom and Zidonuke have logged into the Starbound forums from the same IP address. Suggesting that either they are the same person or their involvement is deeper than suggested.
• Crashdoom has been pming chucklefish staff/moderators attempting to have bad reviews/informative criticism on his mod page removed. (we haven't complied).
• Whilst the code is available for peer review, there are executables released along side the source that could contain anything.
• The code contains this: http://pastebin.com/Z7Em369g Whilst this code isn't malicious. It is sending stats to a third party server. Something I've yet to see disclosed?
• This kind of drama rubbish is a waste of my and everyone elses time.
• Finally, we're going to be adding our own server management commands/tools anyway.

Whilst all of this could be one massive coincidence, clearly things here aren't on the up and up. My first priority here is protecting the Starbound community. Sadly it's impossible for us to check the contents of every tool/mod. But staying away from executables is a good start.

He seems to be on the level.

[an hoopoe]

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43154957

[ohboyherewego]

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43154957

Here we fucking go

[Pi]

Zidonuke has the qualifications of being from Dragoneer and Net-cat's social circle and of having worked as a programmer on F-list where he spied on the users of the site and put backdoors into the site to screw up it's database after he was discovered

Fear of this is, supposedly, the main reason I wouldn't be allowed to work on FA. So, of course, it's perfectly reasonable to find someone who ACTUALLY DID THIS to work on their shite.

[an hoopoe]

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43155642

[Dima]

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6265766#cid:43155220

Well I for one am glad that he learned his lesson and grew up in such a short time.

[nrr]

See also https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php?topic=467.msg4688#msg4688. HTH. HAND. FOAD.

[ohboyherewego]

So he was on for a year? What the fuck has been up to? It sure as hell hasn't been fixing shit or getting tickets that's for sure. Loving all this "transparency".

[winserv03fan]

Don't know if something is down or what, but all the comments seem to be gone.

Edit:


Even the number of comments thing is erased.

[ohboyherewego]

Don't know if something is down or what, but all the comments seem to be gone.

Edit:


Even the number of comments thing is erased.

They're all gone.

[Campion1]

I went ahead and captured the entire comment string with Zidonuke.

http://www.2imgs.com/7c4385af7c

Hopefully it shows well for you guys.

[winserv03fan]

It appears they have edited the code for fender journals so that people can't comment on them. What a way to fix the problem. Don't fix the site, just don't let people get to the information!

Here's the entire page with the comments.

[Conan]

A few years ago, I was a systems administrator for a Minecraft server. During that time, a griefing group known as "Team Avolition" popped up, which caused an increasing amount of paranoia amongst the users of our server and most other public servers. It got to the point that faking a login with one of the Avolition member's names would cause people to freak out.

Around the same time, Zidonuke released a Minecraft hack client called "Yiffcraft", and charged $85 for a copy. Over time, he eventually was able to join Team Avo and work on their own in-house hack client, called "Reliant". This is all mentioned in a HackForums thread located here.

Except the fun doesn't end here. He ultimately earned himself a ban from the Avo forums and they wiped most of his posts. So even Minecraft griefers don't want him around.

So, that is the kind of person that Dragoneer has entrusted everyone's private messages and passwords to.

EDIT: Turns out the comments thing was totally a performance issue that somehow, Yak didn't notice for all these years!!!

https://trello.com/c/TvkK2Zim/72-fender-journal-comments-were-causing-performance-issues-and-had-to-be-disabled


EDIT 2: The portion about the Reliant client release has been redacted as it's not clear what was going on at that point.

[ohboyherewego]

A few years ago, I was a systems administrator for a Minecraft server. During that time, a griefing group known as "Team Avolition" popped up, which caused an increasing amount of paranoia amongst the users of our server and most other public servers. It got to the point that faking a login with one of the Avolition member's names would cause people to freak out.

Around the same time, Zidonuke released a Minecraft hack client called "Yiffcraft", and charged $85 for a copy. Over time, he eventually was able to join Team Avo and work on their own in-house hack client, called "Reliant". This is all mentioned in a HackForums thread located here.

Except the fun doesn't end here. Once he gained access to the source code for Reliant, he dumped it onto HackForums, much to the chagrin of Team Avo. He earned himself a ban from the Avo forums and they wiped most of his posts.

So, that is the kind of person that Dragoneer has entrusted everyone's private messages and passwords to.

EDIT: Turns out the comments thing was totally a performance issue that somehow, Yak didn't notice for all these years!!!

https://trello.com/c/TvkK2Zim/72-fender-journal-comments-were-causing-performance-issues-and-had-to-be-disabled

Yeah, performance issues, not because the thread was full of him and crashdoom shitposting right?

[ColonThree]

I'm beginning to wonder if FA is actually a long-running study in habituation, to see just how much shit a person can take, if the level of shittery is gradually increased over many years. It seems at this point, 'neer could go to users' houses and defecate all over their faces, and they'd be perfectly happy with that as long as they're told it somehow helps keep FA running. To brazenly delete every single comment (hundreds of them!) on one of Fender's journals whilst bragging about "transparency" -  and so soon after the farcical fundraiser - is a level of bullshit Baghdad Bob would be proud of.

Edit to note that comments have in fact been removed from all of Fender's journals. Oh boy I hope FA runs faster now!