04-02-2009, 12:11 AM meijin WatchGeeks Owner True WatchGeek
Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: Atlanta, GA Posts: 11,985 Real Name: Michael
An apology to the WatchGeeks membership The Owners of Watchgeeks.net have become aware of a very serious breach of the confidential areas of our Forum. This is a critical issue and we feel our entire forum must be made aware of the situation. Briefly, during the transition to the new software, all the threads and posts in our Moderator’s AND Owner’s areas were inadvertently left accessible to anyone, including guests, that logged on. The “door” was opened for approximately 5 hours. The good news is that Personal Messages of members were NOT accessed during the breach. What is the “Moderator’s Lounge” and “Owner’s Lounge”? Simply put, this is much like the teachers lounge of any school. A place where we as the Admin and Mod team can discuss current events, topics, issues and whatnot. Not only is it a place that we can privately strategize on how to run the forum, but it is also a place for our team to “blow off steam” when topics, or members get to be “too hot to handle”. Instead of a team member reacting publicly to a situation, they can vent to the team, and then regroup and deal with the situation, or person, in a more calm and reasonable manner. The Moderator’s lounge is a safe place to “count to ten” before re-entering the main public forums. In the course of these conversations comments can be made that, when taken literally, can absolutely be read as crude and derogatory in nature against one or more individuals who populate our forum. "Mod forums" and "Admin forums" are a part of most every forum on the internet, regardless of the forum's subject matter. As some of our current members here have been mods elsewhere, they can also attest to this. The unfortunate result is now obvious. Screen captures of specific posts and threads, as well as our secure and private contact information, are now in the hands of many people that would like to use this private info against the ownership and administrative team and this information is already on the way to the infinite reaches of the internet. Several members of the administrative team have already received threatening emails to the personal addresses that were gathered during the intrusion. One such threat was to send out our team’s personal home addresses and phone numbers to anyone they choose to. The Moderator’s Lounge has always been the place where our Team could blow off steam, make private commentary amongst ourselves and be secure in the knowledge that what was said would NEVER go outside of the Management “family”, sadly this internal commentary is destined to be made public.