Very disappointed

Thursday Dec 16th 2004

I recently discovered some really shocking stuff on one of the message boards hosted on my web server. Or maybe not so shocking depending on your point of view.

And here it is: Some of the private message discussions were trading porn site username/passwords.

As you may or may not know, trading passwords like that is highly illegal and can carry huge fines (sometimes up to $25,000 per incident). All I could do is sit back and say “whoa..” then I promptly removed the message board in its entirety and wiped the directory clean.

Here are some quick questions answered so I don’t get blasted for what I did:

1) What were you doing reading private messages?
As the site administrator I purposely scan the database for anything which would be illegal. Any responsible site administrator would do the same thing.

2) How did you read the private messages?
The database itself. It’s on my server physically. I read them. All of them.

3) Isn’t reading private messages illegal on a message board?
Not in the slightest. A site administrator can scan his databases and read anything in them any time he wants to. A good example is here. See section that states “Forum administrators reserve the right to read or otherwise access your “private” information…” meaning there is no such thing as “private” info on a public message board - even when you send a “private” message. There was a similar clause in the user agreement for the message board I deleted. Of course, the people who decided to trade those illegal user/passwords didn’t bother to read that part of the agreement.

—

Yeah, I’m very disappointed. I know exactly who wrote the messages, when they wrote them and where they were delivered.

Really don’t know what to say about it. Guess I got had. Oh well. Live and learn I suppose. But at least I know now the problem has been addressed and taken care of, permanently.

rss feed for this article's comments

comments and pings are closed for this article

« ‘Vette vid.. check it!Day off? »