From the depths of scary places in public records...

Walt is listed as the legal registered agent for Dirt Cheap Advertising, LLC, so if he doesn't own it himself, he at least calls the shots and takes all the legal blows. (or is incredibly unlucky in choice of partners) The filing has been active since May of '07. There appear to be about 4 other LLC's linked to him, but I got bored and stopped digging.

Oh, and I'm not so sure this was a huge loss for him, at least from the look of his headquarters...There appeared to be a very large pool.

Please to be noting, the IP addresses were appearing in the contact form info section. I don't know if the admins had access to that, but I'd never even seen it until Walt borked the system. I don't think I ever saw a thread where mods were discussing IP addresses. So that's one less tin foil hat you have to wear.

Ninja'd by Ali...

I'm not planning to pull the Oasis down. But what will stay there is currently undecided. The only thing that is for sure remaining at the Oasis is the contest section. That was the whole reason it was started, so, we're keeping it. Other than that, I'm waiting for things to sort out with the clone and will decide where to move forward with the Oasis after that. So for sure it will have the contests and some general chat and stuff, but other than that, it's not decided yet.

But only some of the public. There are other non staff, non talent who can't see it. What on EARTH did he do?

Walt is SPECIAL. How do you REVERSE the permissions while trying to lock them down?!? Moron...

Are you all specifically seeing a forum marked mod/contrib section? Because I asked a non staff member to check, and she couldn't see it. That screen shot seems to be a search results screen... But yes. He's borking stuff...

*raises hand* About the Oasis, yes, it probably got overloaded. I was able to get in just now though. I'll try and keep an eye on it as much as I can, but it most definitely was not originally setup to handle the mass flood of people it's gotten. I pretty much figured we'd maybe have 100 members after a month or so... Yeah...not so much. That was like the first 12 hours.   There are a few options I'm looking at to try and streamline it for the traffic it's getting, but work's started for the week, so I have to do all this on my breaks.

Aside from the general batshit craziness she suffers from, one of my mods is someone she flung out of her forum over a very politely phrased concern ON ANOTHER SITE. When I say no dramaz, I mean it. And that person is drama in a time bomb. I'm not a ban happy person, in fact I hate doing it, but not with people like that who only exist to cause problems. I know there are other people that like her and haven't had problems with her, more power to you. I however have no interest in even giving her brand of crazy a chance.

Hehehehehe...Astonishingly, she beat out the front runner for the honor of the first Oasis ban. And I didn't forget to ban her username. Or her IP. 

I'm in favor of SMF. I'm using it at the Oasis, and I've used it elsewhere. It's great. (except for the damned no-moderated-post issue...but that could be me being dumb as a rock) And um, I have to ask about this poll...Are we polling staff or members? Because um, well, SMF is really easy to use for pretty much everyone. I occasionally want to poke the admin interface with sticks, but again, because I'm a little rusty and forget where I left the buttons. If there's major flaws in VB, AND it's costing money to set up, pitch it! Like I said, the only problem I've had with it so for is the inability to create a board that auto hides topics. *shrugs* I say SMF.

And let me know about that poll.

No worries here. There are just people who would like to grab old entries when stuff is back up somewhere. A really large number of people do stories with them, and there were a few contests in progress that we're trying to salvage. But we have most of a workaround sorted out now, so we're just waiting. 

Ok, cool. Thanks.

Princess Bride FTW!

I'll post a notice to hold off at the Oasis. Pescado, once you get the backup, can I convince you to hold onto the contest section data long enough for my refugees to pillage it?

I'm totally down for Pescado taking over if the staff will have say over what's going on. However, I will not be planning on moving the contest section back. If we can get back what was up before, we'll finish out what was in progress on the clone, and move everything else over, after a fashion. I posted a whole explanation of why at the Oasis, but it's big enough to be its own site, has been for some time, and after what I went through to keep it from getting deleted in the last few months, I'm not interested in doing anything like that ever again and moving it is the step I'm taking to avoid that. But on all other fronts, I think it's a great idea. You have my vote.

Thank you very much! I still have plans to fiddle with a bunch of stuff and customize the theme some more. And I need to quit slacking and make a splash page for the main site. I just feel anti photoshop tonight.


I don't know if anyone has contacted her, but I know she has a lot of health problems, so she might not even be able to respond for quite a while if someone was able to let her know.