Hi, I'm Nil, the admin of the Inner Weave. It's a quiet little forum for myself and some writery friends of mine.
I don't think I've lost my forum forum anymore, but I would like to figure out what is going on. (This line has been editted.)
I've been traveling for winter break and today it occured to me that I hadn't checked on my forum recently.
So I googled inner weave everloom. Stuff showed up as usual, and I clicked on the appropriate link.
...and found myself on someone else's forum. (Try it yourself.)
Understandably, this scared me, as I would absolutely hate to see my forum somehow be deleted. Reading around the support forums, I noticed that forums die after 30 days of inactivity. I thought, "Hey, I've been traveling for the last month or so, and maybe nobody else did anything on my forum during that time... and some other person registered onto the sub-domain name."
I would be fine with that outcome, since it's all according to the rules, and if I knew better, I could have avoided that fate...
And then I started looking at the forum I wound up at, and realised that it had been around since October. Not only that, but the forum had no reason to name use sub-domain "everloom.free-forum.org" - it was about the verichip, an interesting issue, but not at all related to the sub-domain.
So then I was going to post up a question of how on earth this all happened. However, I got sidetracked reading a thread about spam users, and started checking some stuff about that. I found myself staring at 436 emails bots requesting verification to post on my forum... with the most recent bots having registered today.
On a whim (I mean, if my forum was gone, what could go wrong), I decided to see what would happen if I clicked on the activation link of one of the emails.
...and I found myself on my forum. That's right, my quiet little forum with the 444 users, and 7 people. After kissing the ground and deleting the bot I had approved, I started going around my forum. I checked recent posts, and found that faile had posted about the new year on the 7th of January (three days ago).
Which means that lifttheveil started a forum on a sub-domain name he doesn't care about, back in October, when the original forum didn't actually die, even in December.
Needless to say, this all confuses me a good deal.
I did some checking around, and with creative url-testing, I found that http://noidchip.free-forums.org produces the same forum that I get to when I google my forum. The admin of noidchip is on this support forum, and has had google/forum related problems. Testing my url raw, I found that I don't have to approve a bot every time I want to get to my forum: http://everloom.free-forum.org
This leaves the problem only with google sending me to the noidchip forum when I click the result for my own problem, but I still am very much curious about how this all comes to happen.
(Other stuff that my forum has spat at me includes 436 bots that got past the reading test, extreme lag a while ago, and the inability to stay logged on to the admin controls. I've had problems other than those, but user error is the leading cause of computer problems, and I researched my way around those problems of mine.)
I guess I'll PM lifttheveil and see what he thinks about this all.
