Topic: FAO MODS: Why not charge a fee to recover hacked accounts? - page 2. (Read 2233 times)

@theymos,

I would volunteer some time to look into the hacked accounts, no hiring, tax returns or anything like that.
As for trust, even in everyday life you can't be 100% sure of anyone.

Thanks for sharing this. This is a part that - as a user - never even crossed my mind. But indeed it makes sense to have legal and tax complications when running a big forum that involves digital money.
I can imagine you're much more of a tech guy, and if that's the part you enjoy, you could even be better off as a user than with all these responsibilities.

Me too!

It would take at least a couple hours every day to deal with them. Each case typically requires a lot of follow-up. And it's really annoying work. I used to do them sort-of regularly, but at some point I just couldn't stand it anymore, in addition to not really having time. Cyrus is still doing some, though not enough to keep up.

There's no need for any fee, and a fee probably wouldn't be appropriate unless absolutely necessary. Money is not a problem. If I could throw $100k at the problem and make it go away, I would do so. But in the real world, there is no magic wishing well where you can throw money and make things happen. You give people money and they don't do what you want, or the people you hire turn out not to be trustworthy, or you fill out the tax forms wrong and then later have to spend more time&money dealing with that than you would've by just doing the thing with current sub-optimal resources, etc.

I acknowledge that the current situation is very bad, and we have some plans for fixing it. I hope to have manual account reviews going smoothly again before the end of the year at the latest.


Yes, this would be very useful. I hate that I'm basically acting as a CEO here. I hate dealing with lawyers and accountants, or figuring out who to hire. This stuff is not my wheelhouse, and is in fact not even on my ship. I wish that someone would take all of that business-related stuff off my hands. But it looks like that's the one aspect which is most difficult to (safely) get rid of, so I've been trying (with only a bit of success) to delegate in other areas.

Account recovery has been a problem for as long as I've been a staff member here. There's a thread in the staff forum from 2014 by an ex-mod complaining about the amount of hacked accounts and users not getting them back and things have got exponentially worse since then, especially after the hack. BadBear at least used to look into them every now and again but now I don't think they are being investigated at all, which really isn't acceptable. I did at the time suggest BadBear charge a fee to recover them and he did say he "wouldn't say no", but in retrospect I don't think this would be ideal. Users shouldn't have to pay to get their accounts back and this could just lead to corruption (or at least accusations thereof) when there's money on the line for them being restored. All this could be remedied by either implementing more admins, giving certain staff access to restore accounts, or theymos automating the process. Alternatively, maybe theymos and cyrus should just take a day or two out of every month to investigate and restore them.

Also, automating the system will still have issues. I think we have to remember that the focus/usage of this forum has shifted (whether we like it or not). Most people who come here these days do so for altcoins and as such they never post bitcoin addresses anyway, and if so then an automated process will be useless for them unless you code one for ethereum and every other alt coin address that someone may have used. An automated process will also likely be abused by account sellers just to take their accounts back after they've been sold unless theymos has thought of a way to prevent this. There's also those who have plenty of other proof the account is rightfully theirs but can't sign a message for whatever reason and those should be investigated especially if the other info is very easy to verify which in some cases it has been but they're still waiting or probably even given up for obvious reasons.


I don't think I said hectic, but what I probably said was that there's likely more to them than just verifying the address and then restoring it. It's likely not just a five minute job.


Not necessarily. Would you do overtime at work if you didn't need to and wasn't going to be compensated for the time and effort? This could possibly seep into why they're not being restored because whether cyrus handles them all day or none at all he isn't going to earn any less or more, so why make time? He might even be losing money if he has other business affairs or work commitments to engage in on or off the forum. If mods were to be paid at all for recovering them then it should likely come out of the forum funds which makes much more sense to me. With that being said, earlier this year cyrus did start getting an additional 'admin fee' which I assumed was to do stuff like this, but maybe he's busy with other things theymos has him doing. I have absolutely no idea whether cyrus is doing a lot of work here behind the scenes or very little at all.


Then hire someone he does trust, you can't just ignore it because it won't go away. theymos mentioned before about hiring someone with a business degree or something to run the forum, but not sure they'd be any better than one of the current staff members. I have actually have a GNVQ in Business Studies from collage, does that count?  .

Thanks. That was quite a read.

One account in 6 months and look at what he went through: the begging, the pleading, the sympathy help and advice from other members, then the anger at mods... geeez! I've been through it all (I think many have). Then a finale worthy of Columbo. The cavalry to the bloody rescue!

Is that a typical example of what it takes to get a hacked account back? 

I shouldn't complain too much after reading that. With help from members my account's already been locked and verified. I'm actually near the front of the queue. Best shut up and get bumping...

Thanks for listening and the advice

He actually did pre-announce the merit system, is was quite a discussion.

That would mean the student is given quite a lot of access on this forum. It has to be someone trusted, otherwise it requires supervision and thus takes more of Admin's time.

I know of a few cases, but they got it back without help from Admin.
As far as I know, account recoveries get a higher priority if Admin recognizes the username.

The website doesn't need money and this isn't about throwing money at the team. It's just a fee that can be put to good use for the forum like all the other fees.

The fee can be given to a pre-uni computing student (with an interest in crypto) who wouldn't mind the experience of being involved with one of the most important sites in crypto (and earning a bit of holiday crypto). That's how IT companies used to handle this sort of backlog in the past. There doesn't appear to be any initiative in resolving the issue. It almost feels like there's a defiant resistance when it comes to resolving this particular issue.

Has anyone got a hacked account back in the last 6 months? Maybe it's only the people who've been unsuccessful (like me) who are making noise. Does anyone know? Have there been any updates?

I actually convey a similar idea long time before,that is arranging a separate staff to recover the hacked accounts will save lot of burden to the theymos.Maybe he don't trust anyone in this forum  

I don't think it's a good idea required fee for recover account. The question isn't for money, question is for time. Only 2 persone have access to account recover and both are too busy. Only solution I can see if moderator have power for account recovery. It's not right he is ignoring, we can't wonder how many PM he receiving as well he is admin of forum. So it's not easy to reply all.

More than enough. The only issue is because the profile address changes aren't dated. Even an archive of it would help it.

Well geez, BPIP can track that easily... would that be enough proof?

Yeah theymos mentioned that in a PM to KWH. Here's the PM,along with KWH's post:



It would have already been released by June(2018) end, its August end, so you just have to wait till....KYC gets implemented. 

Theymos has mentioned many times that the forum is not in need of money. So a fee for recovery wouldn't incentivise them to speed it up.

The payments for "evil" are presumably meant to be some sort of punitive fine.

Account recovery in it's current form is just low on the list of priorities for the only 2 people with the ability to perform them. It sucks but in general it does not impede anyone from using the forum so I can understand the prioritizing.

I will post for the record (and for future compensation talks with Theymos), that I created this thread almost 3 years, 8 months and 2 days before Theymos announced the merit system. 

 

My memory's spotty, but he might've for some features (especially if they affect moderation), however, for most stuff, we usually find out as soon as the rest of the forum does. So if there's gonna be an automated account recovery feature, I'll probably find out as soon as everyone else.

Seems logical to add 1-3 trusted people to look into these accounts then fast track to Cyrus or theymos.

Did Theymos pre-announce any of his previous projects, like Merit?

We have no idea what he is working on or what he might announce tomorrow.

AFAIK he did mention something of sort (bit too lazy to actually search for the specific post). It has been a while though so I wouldn't hold my breath on it coming out any time soon.

Wasn't Theymos working on a system that would allow us to regain control of our account by email? Something similar to the possibility to lock our account when the email and password were changed. Wasn't it supposed to be added very soon?