Unforseen Consequences news

Well first of all, this might not be the news update that people would expect from us. I know that quite a few are still anticipating our “Follow-up” media release to complement the previous one, but due to an unfortunate event we’ve been pretty much forced to postpone the MR due to the after-effects.

Without further ado, I’ll get to the point of this new update:

On the 29^th of November at 0400 GMT +1 the OBM forums were ‘hacked’ by the previous moddb member and earlier OBM developer known among others as Vaynecactus/Mutandis/Mutatis/Underside/Baph0MeV.
Personally I didn’t know about the incident at all before I logged on to msn and our lead level designer added me to a mass conversation with the words “Welcome to the shit storm”.

Turns out Vayne had managed to guess my login password (which wasn’t very secure I admit). I had thought for quite some time that I should probably change it for that exact reason, but by some chance I never got around to it. It is a lesson learned and I have re-enforced my password. With the stolen password Vayne used my accounts admin powers to wipe the forum and ban everyone on the dev team and for some reason delete the save log for the FTP server and replaced it with the text “Ha ha ha”.

Secondly he wrote to our webmaster that he was taking revenge (for what I’m still clueless about) and that he was holding our forum ransom. A poor ransom that was considering that vossey does an automatic backup of the forum database and that we copy and store the FTP locally on a regular basis.

Now before anyone goes bananas about this, let me make one thing clear:

We are not down, we are not dying and we are not dead. The worst thing that this ‘hacking’ incident brought about is that I’ll have to email Trollhunter, who followed Vayne to our forum when he sought to apply, and apologise for not taking him more seriously in his warnings against Vayne. Even though it WAS hard to take him seriously meandering into our forum like an elephant in a glass store, trampling anyone who tried to get anything sensible out of him. But I guess that means we both learned something from this.

Actually, none of the stuff Vayne has pulled off in his so called "social engineering experiments" has resulted in anything but the team moving forward as a stronger, more focused group. True, he did violate the dev teams integrity, but him wiping the forum actually meant we had a chance to move to our new forum without any hang ups about copying over the old posts. In essence it gave us a fresh start forum wise. (Please note only the forum posts and all the registered accounts from the old forum are gone, we still have all our dev files locked away nice and safe!)

So this news update is really a positive one, as I can announce our new forum, which is paid service hosting. I and the team would like to thanks our webmaster for setting this up for us and we hope you enjoy it! This forum will also host exclusive content that will not be released on moddb, so hurry up and register!

In addition I can announce that the team has had a surge of new members with three past devs returning. Two of them are level designers and one is a modeller/texture artist. Also at our doorstep last week were four new applicants; two modellers/texture artists, one concept artist and one animator. The two modellers have finished their trial assignments and have joined the team.

So in conclusion; thank you Vayne. Thank you for giving us the much needed clean slate to finally leave our old forum and seek newer, better digital grounds. Thank you for pushing the team forward and uniting us further as a team and thank you for letting us trace your internet provider so that we may contact them should you try anything like this again with the new forum. Which is, as you by now know is a paid service, and you being one step away from 18 would allow us to take legal action in some way or another.

To the moddb community and our fans I have one word: Christmas.

OBM Dev Team