Okay, here's the truth as I know it at this point. I received a pm from a member here the other day indicating that you spammed them by soliciting your forum (greatlakesaquaria.com for those of you not familiar). Here is what I was forwarded via a copy and paste. The user's name has been redacted by me to protect their privacy:
GLAJoe
Probationary
Newbie
Posts: 2
49037
Fish forum
« Sent to: ******** on: October 30, 2011, 10:15:29 AM »
« You have forwarded or responded to this message. » ReplyQuoteDelete
Hello, I own and admin GreatLakesaquaria.com. We just started up in July. You should stop by and check us out.
Joe
http://www.joefish.me/After I received this pm, I started this thread to try to determine if you had solicited other members and if that was your only purpose in joining this site, because quite frankly, you haven't contributed much of anything since the 29th of October when you joined.
As a precautionary measure, I created a new membergroup to shut off your ability to pm while I investigated the matter.
I then received the following message via Regalblue, who is an active member of both sites:
Regalblue,
JoeFish has sent you a new personal conversation entitled "MCA".
JoeFish said:
======================================================================
Well my pm privileges have been removed on MCA and it now says I am a probationary member. If you don't mind could you let Marty know i have not used his PM system to recruit members and never will. I will even change my screen name if need be. My guess is the guy he is having problems with is username: ******** I had problems with him on here also, mainly with dogging the staff and begging to be a mod in exchange for shutting down his forum.
Joe
At this point, I felt I had no other choice but to access the most recent backup copy of the database. Frankly, the fact that I had to to do this makes me angry, and I'll explain why. I'm a big believer in privacy, and I have enough to do without having to have to sort through God knows how much data to figure out who was not telling the truth. In the database, here is what I found:
'GLAJoe', 1319984129, 'Fish forum', 'Hello, I own and admin GreatLakesaquaria.com. We just started up in July. You should stop by and check us out.
Joe'),
This is an exact copy and paste from the database. So, while a copy and paste of a private message can be faked, the database cannot. Unless of course your account was hacked the day after you joined...........
So at this point, I know for a fact you solicited at least one member. If I would've saved the previous backup copies of the database, maybe I would have found more? I don't know, and I won't know unless I'm contacted by other members.
For anyone that is confused after reading this, pm's are saved by the database when a back up copy is made if the sender and recipient have not deleted them. So it is possible that other pm's were sent, but have been subsequently deleted by both parties. Since I only keep one backup copy of the database, I only know for sure that one pm was sent.
