Wow, just wow. The wild part is reading the posts from Req. You can see how much he regrets how that thing went down but still tries to play it off like he didn't care.
First thing. Thank you Req for the 10 years of FoH. It sucks you let a friend use you to the point that you stopped giving a fuck and you couldn't just hand it off and walk away. But ya did. You were played and while you were laughing at us guess who was laughing at you?
and this:
Really man your story is for over two fucking years someone monitored old bot accounts to see if they would eventually gain access? Whatever. I still enjoyed the old FoH forum thanks for hosting it for so long. A piece of advice watch your back the people you count as friends apparently aren't. Also when you're in an argument and UT comes off as the sane one that's some serious shit.
Sure, I do care, and things didn't go like I thought they would, but it's not that I'm trying to play anything off. Not hosting foh is actually a bittersweet victory as far as my overall life is concerned. I've been in a new world for 5+ years, a world where things like due diligence in the course of investment are likely to put the crazy shit that gets posted in front of people who I really don't want seeing it through the lens of my own personal endorsement. Beyond that, with more and more regulation and "internet bullying" legislation going on, it may actually have become a criminal liability someday. I also don't miss the constant stream of C&D and DMCA notices that have to be taken care of before I get sued.
And yes, that's my story. And it's the truth. If you do some research, you will find out that forums became the new craze for spamming for a few years there, and yes, in a competitive market somebody did do that. It really wouldn't be that hard, by the way. More like a footnote in the rest of the code the bot runs. Databases are not a new or complicated thing. For example, fohguild.org also had a database with all of those logins in it for 10 years, and still does technically. Also, a LOT of forums, EJ as one example, have a 1-7 day delay between when you register and when you can post, specifically to thwart bots. So the re-checking would be pretty mandatory for anything I would personally write in a competitive market to do something like that.
Edit - No particular reason for posting this aside from that it's interesting, but we can pretty much rule out an actual targeted attack by somebody that knew what I did with accounts on FoH(approving everybody every few years), because a person like that certainly would have known that the bots can post javascript, and none of them were. They were just trying to raise pagerank for their clients. Everything they posted was for google/etc's bots, not for you or to exploit your browser or system. (Not to be confused with whatever was exploiting vBulletin, later, specifically TO exploit your browser/system by modifying templates).