Right seen people refer to it a few times now Two questions how do you do it? And why would the fook you want to do it?

 

only admin can do that, and im not sure they would want to particuarly, not for any reason i can think of, who cares its not like it means anything much anyway.

 

it normally means people post a load of drivel

 

From what i am aware, admin cannot alter you post counts

*waits for stu to come and and tell me i am wrong lol

 

STFU welsh goon!

 

Admin can alter post counts, wether or not stu knows how to i cant comment on. LOL

 

see 3 candidates already

 

who is rastus ?

 

Its not something we will ever do for someone so its irrelevant. lol.

If Admin can i dont know how to do it Chip as the post count is part of the database i believe, and not something administraters of php can access as std.

 

So i was sort of right pmsl

 

On some php forums people do edit them just when moving from an ezboard or something so that users dont lose their post count, for this reason its possible to have it as an option in the admin panel, one of the sites i admin has this for example, its stored against the user profile and can be manually over ridden.

I cant remember what options you have in the admin panel on PF, and its probably changed since i saw it last anyway, but its certainly possible.
If nothing else you could of course just pump a million entries into the database in sql that just say "hello" as replies to a thread or something anyway.

 

Its not std PHP, youve seen a modified one chip and anyway, posting a million "Hellos" into teh database is also NOT something an administrator can do in PHP as he has no database access as std

Of course Petrucci as webmester can do as he likes.

 

Its std in some version of php forums, i couldnt comment on if it is on the PF version or not though.

 

Invision forums have it as a standard option for admin, at least the newer versions do, anyway......it's been a LONG time since I've admin'd a phpBB forum, so can't remember what options admin get (and I'd imagine PF has been tweaked and modified somewhat from standard).

 

yeh its a feature on invioson boards

 

Chip are you a mod on here now then?

 

No, i was an admin briefly, but only as the result of a (unrequested but necessary) security audit to see if PF could be easily hacked, we then reported to Pet how to stop it happening in future. Pet then set about upgrading everything in site.
Hence the site is now faster and more secure than ever

 

And did you manage to hack it?

 

Yes, we gained full admin access, and the ability to delete every post on the fourm and all the users and change who all the mods were.

Its a VERY good job it was someone with PF's best interests at heart and not someone who would want to harm the site!

But Pet has it all water tight now, so no need to worry about someone else doing the same

 

So how has Dave got so many posts?

 

We would of course just restore a backup from that day and only lose an hour or so's worth of PF if that were to happen naturally.

It was an exploit that was available for all forms of PHP forum running the base revision that we were and was well documented on hacking sites, so yeah, we were lucky.

 

Have you not seen how many...

"pics or STFU" posts there is??

 

see told ya so ...

 

I know

Who are you

 

No way!
Any decent hacker would have made it FAR more difficult than that if they were being malicious.

Every day you delete a different selection of archived threads day by day until eventually it gets noticed, at which point to recover the useful threads you have to go back over months and months worth of backups and load them all into a big F-off table and then select the unique ones to get them back out as no single backup has everything you want in it anymore.

Thats just one example, there are loads of other things too, not least of which would be stuff like rippping off your entire database of all peoples contact details of course and editing all those over a period of time so you end up with a big percentage of 18000 users none of whom have the correct email details anymore in the their profile so cant request a new passwod and have had their passwords changed and you dont know which ones got changed when or how to recover them so you have to wait for 2000 people to all email you asking for help, likewise signing all 18000 members up for every nasty porn and spam email list going which whatever you then do with PF afterwards they are all still stuck on etc, its amazing how much trouble some of these assholes can cause if they really want to Stu, you are being very complacent if you think that the only person you have to deal with is one who will just click the big delete button
Ive (as part of a job i used to have) had to do rescue jobs on after hackers have been in there in the past and trust me you would be amazed at some of the things they come up with! (not specifically for forums i dont mean but it all applies in much the same way)

Obviously anything a hacker does can be undone on the forum, but its the extent to which they can potentially piss off your users thats hard to recover from.

Plus obviously the whole time you are "undoing" everything (which would take you days) the site isnt up which further pisses people off etc

 

Very interesting stuff. Glad its all safe now