# *TravisJ45 Post II?

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Posted by Rick [Rick] on November 07, 1999 at 00:27:36 {zExURjw8QA7mY4XD8K2cFMFBt36Xyc}:

In Reply to: TravisJ45 Post II? posted by Adam Covington on November 06, 1999 at 13:34:31:

Settle down! There is no deliberate attempt to deceive anyone. An administrator has said he applied the FPP in a certain manner, and rampant speculation he was trying to "protect" Greg ensued. Subsequently, AF (who has no affiliation with H2O) reposted one of the posts and again H2O is getting a bad rap for not posting the other.

Well, it seems that in the end, what goes around comes around. I was reminded that years ago, a little tidbit of code in our wwwboard scripts created two sets of postings simultaneously -- one in the public messages/ area, and the other in a hidden "vault." Tonight the board was rebuilt due to file corruption from an unknown source, and the script recovered those posts from this hidden "vault." Evidently a provision for hackers deleting posts from the messages/ area was built-in to the rebuild script, and it "noticed" that there were gaps in the numbering sequence of files. Ordinarily, only files that are deleted by the moderator tools should accountor numbering gaps. The administrator, stating that no rule existed for the method of deletion (and therefore deleting the posts directly), creating gaps in the posting numbering sequence without updating a file that tracks moderator deletions. The script therefore "thought" that the files were not validly deleted but rather removed by a rogue process, and restored them from the hiddle "vault."

I won't bore visitors further with technical details, but simply want to sum it up:

CLONES OF ALL POSTS BY GREG WERE ALWAYS SITTING IN THE H2O HIDDEN "VAULT" AND ARE NOW ON THE BOARD IN THE EXACT LOCATION THEY EXISTED PRIOR TO DELETION.

Therefore, everyone can see these posts for themselves and there is no more mystery or heresay. ;-)

I also restored Greg's latest topic myself. Evidently the threads on this board vanished, but the postings remained in the public messages/ area. I can't imagine why Greg's latest post was deleted. I thought it was a rebuild script error, but it's terribly coincidental that Greg's new topic was the only one missing out of them all. However, I don't want to blame anyone because the posts themselves were not missing. (Had they been missing, I would have had to go looking for the "vault" or ran the rebuild script over, which thankfully wasn't the case!)

I've verified the board by comparing a version from before the build to the latest version, and see no discrepancies. All is well now.

Rick

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