My Site Got Deleted For No Apparent Reason

[Cube Domain1405241509 0]

My site, cubedomain.astahost.com was there yesterday and doesn’t exist right now. I would like to know why.I had enough hosting credits on my account. So that wasn’t a legitimate excuse for deletion. The only reason that comes to mind why it could have been cut off was because my site is religious. And if you didn’t want it on Xisto due to that reason, you should have had the decency to tell me. I would have gotten a new host, I really would.I believe I deserve a reason. And if this topic is deleted, at least I’ll know I stood up for what I believed in.

[vizskywalker 0]

You made a post, I do not remember which one, that had credits adjusted for failure to use thequote tag on plagiarised content. You lost enough credits (it was a large post) to put your account below -30 credits, at which point it was automatically deleted. I am sorry, but Xisto has strict rules about this, and the administrators took the proper and listed action.It had nothing to do with the content of your site. I believe you are welcome to gain another set of hosting credits and reapply for hosting, although, unfortunately, all of the content stored on your site is permanently deleted.~Viz

[Cube Domain1405241509 0]

Oh, you mean this one:

http://forums.xisto.com/topic/86830-topic/?findpost=

If you would look into it, you'd see that Kopel's article was quoted. I even listed the source. No one has even edited it.

I'm sorry but you have to understand, I've spent countless hours building the content on my site. Granted, it was my fault that I didn't make back-ups but my post still doesn't justify that claim, since clearly all credits were given. Just look at this:

Source: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Take away people's work, years of posts, art, poetry, discussions, thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, games, humor and lives. Take their money and give them useless promises. Say you'll do one thing and then instead do nothing. Ruin their communities and break their spirit. Then tell them you're still thinking about some sort of compensation for their loss. Weeks of waiting and all for nothing....
And this is where we come today. And this is why this page was founded. The sheer level of arrogance and absurdity and quite frankly *BLEEP* of Labatt's announcement is why I realized I had to let people know exactly how terrible they are and why you need to boycott their services. This is the entire entry for the day. It is so horrific that it deserves to be read all the way through. This is what we're told after many of us losing everything.
Day Twenty-Four- June 23nd:
Hello everyone,

Throughout the past few weeks we have been thinking about compensation for the effects of the vicious attack made on all of us. In our review we considered many factors including: how many of the services we provide were impacted, how those services were impacted, and the final outcome of the attack. Through this review we have determined that save for a few hours, all of ezboardâs services were available to users in the last three weeks. Communities were able to post and read as normal. What were not available were the historical posts. Other than the continuity of a threadâs train of thought, the disappearance of historical content did not affect the delivery of services.

With the above in mind, we have tried to balance a number of competing demands: the impact of the data loss and the agreements made between the site and our users in the Terms of Use everyone has agreed to, to name two. Based on this review our conclusions are:

1. Every current Gold Community, and every Gold Community subscription that lapsed since the attack, will receive six weeks of additional subscription credit.
2. Refunds will not be provided for paid subscriptions or unused Community Chest contributions
3. Unused Community Chest contributions may be transferred by the contributor to other ezboard communities, or used for ezSupporter subscriptions.
4. All credits will be applied at the conclusion of the payment data restoration, which we expect to take between 1 and 2 weeks
5. We will consider individual requests for special consideration, and will provide you with a special e-mail address to submit your requests at the conclusion of the payment data restoration. Requests submitted through other means (CS or e-mailing me or other staff directly) will not be responded to.

How did we get to our decision? We have based this policy on three principles. The first is the agreement we have with our users about our responsibility for services. This is clearly defined in the Terms of Use (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) that you agreed to when you registered, and again when you ordered subscription services and or made a payment to a Community Chest. The Terms of Use read

- You understand and agree that the Service is provided "AS-IS" and that ezboard assumes no responsibility or liability for, among other things, (1) any service outages or interruptions (2) the unavailability of particular boards, features or services, (3) the inability to access the Service, (4) the failure or inability to post materials to the Service, (4) the deletion of materials posted to the Service or (5) the failure to store materials posted to the service. (see paragraph 3)
Ezboard makes no warranty that ⌠(ii) the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free. (see paragraph 14)

Under the TOU we provide an âas isâ service, and you and we have agreed specifically that we are not responsible for the outcome of the attack.

Second, we should all remember that the ezboard service is comprised of many elements, which have been consistently provided over time. Those elements include the service and its attributes (posting, reading, customization etc.), hosting and bandwidth, use and maintenance of the application, provision of customer service. And yes, preparation of backups. Those services were, and are, being provided. The hacker was able to damage one aspect of the service â the deployment of backups -- but that does not take away from what we have provided, and continue to provide, for our users and communities.

Third, in the TOU there is a very clear and consistent policy on all funds paid for our subscription programs:

- Any fees due or paid by you under the CSC program are non-refundable in part or in whole (see paragraph 9)

Regardless of whether they are in Community Chest or a subscription, all funds paid to ezboard have only one use â to pay for ezboard services. We intend to provide the services of your choice for the money youâve paid. If your community has a positive Community Chest balance, that balance may be used to purchase ezboard services only. The attack does not change our long-standing policy of not providing refunds. This was agreed to by every user each time a service order was placed or payment made.

We realize that for some of you this is not the answer you are seeking. Please keep in mind that the hacker has done damage to everyone in the ezboard universe â the communities, admins, users, and the company. We are all sharing that pain.

We believe that we are making a fair and significant effort to compensate for that damage.

We are moving ahead, to a new beginning. The first step has been the completion of the board restoral process. The next step is the release of a new community engine. We invite you to try it out and we will send invitations in the coming weeks. You should know that the new community engine has solved many of the issues that you have experienced on ezboard in the last year. It is faster, more reliable, offers automated back-up to your home computer, fast restorals, the features you love and new features youâll want like RSS, blogging and more.

We appreciate your patience and support through this difficult period and look forward to your continued support.

Sincerely,

Robert Labatt
CEO

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, you did in fact read that correctly. Not only does Labatt utterly belittle the enormity of the attack and the loss of data, he blatantly lies and states that the downtime was really only a matter of a few hours. You'll remember that not only were thousands of boards plagued with errors and bugs for weeks after the initial attack, but that ezboard Help Forum Moderators continually advised members and owners that they should not post on their boards, then that they could but there were still errors, then that they could but they were not sure if it was stable or not. Even Labatt's own updates stated they did not know if it was safe to post or not.

Additionally, you'll note the extremely rude and cold manner of his post. Prior to this, for three weeks, he began each announcement with the greeting, "Greetings ezboard Family." Labatt's idea of family clearly isn't inline with what I'd consider family. One does not treat family with such utter and biting disrespect. Several hundred posts immediately sprang up on the ezboard Help Forum by rightfully irate members condemning Labatt for his arrogance and downright rude tone. This more then anything enraged thousands of ezboard members.

Labatt coldly with the mood of one who's forced to talk down to the "little people" reminds us of only half of the TOU. Ezboard's policy is one of "we don't have to provide the service you paid for but you are being held to the agreement." Labatt does not understand the two-way street of this agreement. He does not recognize that ezboard utterly failed to deliver services as paid for. That they were negligent in their security. That they mislead and in some cases, outright lied to members on the status of the situation as well as the reality of the damage done. In short, they took your money and then laughed at you.

Keep in mind that money in the Community Chest has not yet been spent; it's money in holding for future purchases. For them to deny to refund unused money is nothing short of criminal.

I see a little bit of Xisto in this...

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

No, actually this one did it. http://forums.xisto.com/topic/87140-topic/?findpost=

And it was me who adjusted the credits, using the script. I do not control the amount of credits it deducts, nor can I counteract it once I see it takes you below -30.

I can assure you I didn't even know your site was religious, in fact I never even visitted your site. So no, that had nothing to do with it. It was simply for the text you copied, even if you quoted part of it. I put the quotes on the second half, where you had pasted the original copy with some text of yourself.

Actually you quote pretty much long articles in a lot of your posts.

[abhiram 0]

A question ... I didn't know that you lose credits if unquoted material is made into quoted by the mods. But still, is it possible to lose 30 credits by just that? Isn't that a little too much?

[vizskywalker 0]

Abhiram, the credit script automatically awards credits for all text not enclosed in some block, either code or quote. Because we know there are some dishonest people in the world, the removal of credits script works in such a fashion as to remove more credits than were gained for the offense, to discourage the practice of posting long plagiarised material or nonsense. If a post earns you more credits than you had, when it is fixed to have the quote blocks added, you will drop into the negatives. If you gained 30 or so credits, but only had 1, you will probably lose enough to drop you below -30. Not knowing the script (OpaQue wrote it himself, and, as far as I know, never shared it with anyone) I don't know what the ratio is, so your best bet is just be very careful about what you post. Also, if you realize you made an erro and forgot to quote or something, simply report the post yourself, state the error, and we will let OpaQue manually adjust the credits, and you will only lose the amount the improper action gave you, so there will be no danger ofdropping below where you were. Remember, you must be proactive in this forum, as the staff cannot read minds, and the scripts don't try to.~Viz

[abhiram 0]

Oh ok ... I lose credits more than 30 ONLY if the post that has been adjusted was worth 30 credits (before adjustment) right ? In short, I lose all the credits that the post awarded me and some more for posting plagiarised content. But does this happen only for intentionally un-quoted posts? For example, in one of my posts, I typed [/quoet] by mistake for a particular post. This was later adjusted by a mod, but do I lose credits for this one as well? I mean, not the credits for just the quoted part, but for the whole post?

[warbird1405241485 0]

For so far as I know you can get at most 10 credits for one post and not anymore (correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I readed this somewhere) so that can't be the reason. But what I do know is that the Xisto servers have been down a few times the past days. Maybe you site is still there and it was just down for a while??? Please check your site again.-=jeroen=-

[vizskywalker 0]

No, warbird, Cube Domain is right, the moderators had a discussion about this, his account was deleted. And I think the maximum awarded is 10 credits, but I don't know all the details about the adjustment script, so I can't answer that question.

 

Abhiram, if it is obvious you ment to quote (like typing [queot] instead of

) I'm sure we will let OpaQue manually adjust so as not to penalize, and if you even forgot to add the tag at all, as I said, report it yourself with that problem, and all will be forgiven.

 

~Viz

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

Personally, if I notice a slight typo in the word quote, I just edit the post and that is it. And the credit maximum per post works like this : If your credits are below 30 (positive 30) the maximum is 30 credits for one post. If you are above +30 credits, you can max get 10 credits.The script however, does penalize, for example, if you check the link to a post made by Cube Domain, for that post I believe he lost almost 50 credits. So yes, the script does penalize, I - just like Vizsky - don't know how the script works or how it was coded, as said it's a private code doodleflicky by OpaQue. CubeDomain had 18 credits when the script to deduct credits was run, and after that he had -33 or so. So the hour thereafter his site got deleted.

[vizskywalker 0]

doodleflicky

I like that word moon, we should make it the first in the Xisto dictionary. But question, is there anyway to get the script to remove just as many credits as were awarded, because If I have essentially a two page quote, but messup the quote tag, I gain 10 credits (probably) when I probably only deserve a couple. If all you do is change the tag, I am up 8 credits from where I should be.
~Viz

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

I honestly do not know ... I know OPaQue can do it.. but I don't know how he does it. The only means I have is that script.