Quote from: The_Tribesman on August 27, 2018, 10:45:05 PM

I've been trying since October, 2017 to recover my hacked account. BCT already has a post ban lifting fee. Why not charge a fee for recovering hacked accounts where account is verified?

There are so many people asking for their hacked accounts to be returned to them. At the moment they're just being completely ignored.

This might work for both parties.

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.

Quote from: pugman on August 27, 2018, 11:46:05 PM

I remember Hilariousandco(Global Mod) saying that Cyrus once mentioned that account recoveries are a hectic task, and a lot of investigation is involved. These account recoveries consume a lot of time,apparently. Since only 2 people can investigate and their time is very limited, so a lot of issues just exist and nothing ever happens.

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.

Quote from: Steamtyme on August 28, 2018, 01:08:39 AM

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.

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.

Quote from: Thanasis on August 28, 2018, 04:08:35 AM

Maybe he don't trust anyone in this forum Shocked

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? Grin

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