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Lonely Codger

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Reiko Iwamaru

And I got a notice of a reply, but now can't see what that reply was. So they replied then put me on ignore. Figures. Guess they really didn't have any actual answers? Ah, well, such is life.

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I didn't block you :L I was saying how it was dumb what they did idk why u couldn't see it... I swear I have been reading everyone's posts

shy gh0st's Wife

Quit squabbling about HOW it happened. It's gone, there's nothing we can do about it. Until people have solid proof of this crazy conspiracy it's all just rumors.

Firebreathing Kitten

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Reiko Iwamaru

And I got a notice of a reply, but now can't see what that reply was. So they replied then put me on ignore. Figures. Guess they really didn't have any actual answers? Ah, well, such is life.


You didn't miss much.

Anyway, regardless of the validity of it all (I'm not an expert so I won't say anything), it's their story and their sticking to their guns. There aren't enough people holding them accountable for a lot of their bullshit, so they'll continue the bullshit because they'll make money from the cash shop no matter what. I wonder how long Gaia can keep up it before the majority of cash shop users decide it's time to close their wallet.

VSC_Heartz's Wife

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O.T.L.
Reiko Iwamaru
ookami_hime_9603


Shut down due to a security hole they found in zOMG!'s depths was a hole that could allow users---if this hole was exploited anyway---could allow user's to hack into the servers and hack into accounts and get into some seriously personal info if they did.

So... dangerous security hole + none of zOMG! staff members were there = shutting it down all together.

And remember how buggy and laggy zOMG! was before the shut down? And considering its old coding? The security hole is honestly unsurprising...but rather it gone instead of secretly endangering users right? It sucks, but we got our rings and other zOMG! items off soulbound, so we can sell them, trash them, etc.

Right, a massive security hole. That they must have known about for months, because they announced they were shutting zOMG down for "maintenance" four months before they actually shut it down. Must have been one heck of a vulnerability to kick them into action so fast, I tells ya. (But, of course, our account security was their primary concern. Except, y'know, for the fact that they left the vulnerable system just sitting there for months at a time before doing anything about it. Almost as if there really wasn't such a major vulnerability, and they just claimed there was so as to avoid saying they wanted to shut down zOMG because it wasn't making them enough money. But that would mean they weren't being honest about their reasons for shutting it down, and that would just be so unlike modern Gaia...)

As I've said before, their cover story doesn't make any sense, at least not from the information they've given. If they shut it down for a vulnerability, why did it take so long to do the actual shutdown? That they announced it so far ahead of time indicates the vulnerability shouldn't have been the reason for the shutdown, but, if it wasn't, there was no reason to shut it down at all. They claimed it was for "maintenance", but you shouldn't need to shut down a live system for that, even assuming you have anyone who knows enough about the code to perform any kind of maintenance at all, which they've claimed they didn't. Coding changes should normally be made in a separate environment than the live code, ported for testing/QA, then moved to the live system. If the alleged vulnerability existed, shutting down the live system might make sense, but then announcing it so far in advance would be dangerously irresponsible.

So, yeah: either they shut zOMG down because of the vulnerability, which means the early announcement doesn't make sense, or they shut it down for some other reason, in which case whatever that reason would be doesn't make sense. Either way, it doesn't make sense, and there's really no way to reconcile Gaia's actions and their statements in such a way that shows them to be entirely truthful about the whole situation.

(And that's not even getting into the issue of how they found the alleged vulnerability. If no one at Gaia was familiar with zOMG's code - or even the language it was coded in, as has been claimed in the past - how did anyone even find it? Finding errors in code like that - especially if you're not looking for a specific issue - isn't particularly easy. And why was anyone even looking in the first place, after leaving it fallow all those years? It just doesn't add up.)

They announced four months in advance they would be taking zOMG offline to work on the coding (and maybe the servers? ). After a short while being offline they said they found a security hole they had no idea how to fix and scrapped it.
I don't like zOMG is gone, but don't go around spreading lies.

Lonely Codger

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ookami_hime_9603
I didn't block you :L I was saying how it was dumb what they did idk why u couldn't see it... I swear I have been reading everyone's posts

No, no, sorry, I didn't mean you. I was referring to the Reiko person I had responded to. After my last response to her (or him, I don't know), she quoted my post (so I got the notification), then added me to her ignore, so I couldn't see her response. I did see your response, no worries. Sorry for the confusion.

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okie just making sure I would feel bad

Lonely Codger

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Busy Bunny
Quit squabbling about HOW it happened. It's gone, there's nothing we can do about it. Until people have solid proof of this crazy conspiracy it's all just rumors.

What would you consider "solid proof", though? Short of finding someone from Gaia willing to publicly admit what's actually going on behind the scenes (not likely any time soon), all we can really do is analyze what information we do have; said information includes Gaia's own official statements, which, as I've been trying to explain, simply don't match up with their actions. (Said information also includes some rudimentary knowledge of IT practices, which, naturally, not everyone is going to have, as most people don't/haven't/won't work in IT, which Gaia seems to be relying on in making their statements.) And as for why that's important, it's because a company that flat-out lies to its customers (for really no reason other than to try to make themselves look better) should be called out on it.

Sure, zOMG isn't coming back. I know that. (Actually, I knew that once they announced their "maintenance shutdown", but too many people were swearing by the veracity of their claims at that point to bother trying to raise the issue.) Still doesn't mean they should be dishonest to their customers with impunity, though.

shy gh0st's Wife

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Busy Bunny
Quit squabbling about HOW it happened. It's gone, there's nothing we can do about it. Until people have solid proof of this crazy conspiracy it's all just rumors.

What would you consider "solid proof", though? Short of finding someone from Gaia willing to publicly admit what's actually going on behind the scenes (not likely any time soon), all we can really do is analyze what information we do have; said information includes Gaia's own official statements, which, as I've been trying to explain, simply don't match up with their actions. (Said information also includes some rudimentary knowledge of IT practices, which, naturally, not everyone is going to have, as most people don't/haven't/won't work in IT, which Gaia seems to be relying on in making their statements.) And as for why that's important, it's because a company that flat-out lies to its customers (for really no reason other than to try to make themselves look better) should be called out on it.

Sure, zOMG isn't coming back. I know that. (Actually, I knew that once they announced their "maintenance shutdown", but too many people were swearing by the veracity of their claims at that point to bother trying to raise the issue.) Still doesn't mean they should be dishonest to their customers with impunity, though.
You care about this stuff way too much. It was just a game, and not even a great one. Like I said, proof. Proof is facts and evidence, not feelings and assumptions. It does no good to get everyone riled up and argue online about something.

Enduring Gaian

So to those that didn't believe my earlier post....

I'm just gonna leave a quote from Narumi here....

Quote:
The reality is there is no one on the Gaia Online team that knows how to do anything with zOMG! short of restarting the servers.


State of Zomg

Made in march of 2013. Plenty of time to try something to save the game. They did nothing. So yeah, they didn't give tenth of a s**t about the customers that contributed to this game, nor the petitions to monetize zomg, or the actual offerings of coding assistance. They wanted the game to sink like a rock and get what they could out of it before it did.

That being said, I never cared about Zomg after Qixter left. So I don't particularly care that the game is gone. But I do care that the staff pretend they make effort when they don't. And it particularly pisses many users off that the staff has claimed "No contributions were made to the game".

Lonely Codger

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Reiko Iwamaru
ookami_hime_9603


Shut down due to a security hole they found in zOMG!'s depths was a hole that could allow users---if this hole was exploited anyway---could allow user's to hack into the servers and hack into accounts and get into some seriously personal info if they did.

So... dangerous security hole + none of zOMG! staff members were there = shutting it down all together.

And remember how buggy and laggy zOMG! was before the shut down? And considering its old coding? The security hole is honestly unsurprising...but rather it gone instead of secretly endangering users right? It sucks, but we got our rings and other zOMG! items off soulbound, so we can sell them, trash them, etc.

Right, a massive security hole. That they must have known about for months, because they announced they were shutting zOMG down for "maintenance" four months before they actually shut it down. Must have been one heck of a vulnerability to kick them into action so fast, I tells ya. (But, of course, our account security was their primary concern. Except, y'know, for the fact that they left the vulnerable system just sitting there for months at a time before doing anything about it. Almost as if there really wasn't such a major vulnerability, and they just claimed there was so as to avoid saying they wanted to shut down zOMG because it wasn't making them enough money. But that would mean they weren't being honest about their reasons for shutting it down, and that would just be so unlike modern Gaia...)

As I've said before, their cover story doesn't make any sense, at least not from the information they've given. If they shut it down for a vulnerability, why did it take so long to do the actual shutdown? That they announced it so far ahead of time indicates the vulnerability shouldn't have been the reason for the shutdown, but, if it wasn't, there was no reason to shut it down at all. They claimed it was for "maintenance", but you shouldn't need to shut down a live system for that, even assuming you have anyone who knows enough about the code to perform any kind of maintenance at all, which they've claimed they didn't. Coding changes should normally be made in a separate environment than the live code, ported for testing/QA, then moved to the live system. If the alleged vulnerability existed, shutting down the live system might make sense, but then announcing it so far in advance would be dangerously irresponsible.

So, yeah: either they shut zOMG down because of the vulnerability, which means the early announcement doesn't make sense, or they shut it down for some other reason, in which case whatever that reason would be doesn't make sense. Either way, it doesn't make sense, and there's really no way to reconcile Gaia's actions and their statements in such a way that shows them to be entirely truthful about the whole situation.

(And that's not even getting into the issue of how they found the alleged vulnerability. If no one at Gaia was familiar with zOMG's code - or even the language it was coded in, as has been claimed in the past - how did anyone even find it? Finding errors in code like that - especially if you're not looking for a specific issue - isn't particularly easy. And why was anyone even looking in the first place, after leaving it fallow all those years? It just doesn't add up.)

They announced four months in advance they would be taking zOMG offline to work on the coding (and maybe the servers? ). After a short while being offline they said they found a security hole they had no idea how to fix and scrapped it.
I don't like zOMG is gone, but don't go around spreading lies.

I'm not spreading lies. I'm trying to explain why their timeline doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't.

Call the initial removal of zOMG a shutdown or taking it offline, whichever you prefer, but there's no effective difference between the terms. A system that's running but inaccessible (offline) is just as usable as a system that's not running at all (shut down). That's just a semantic issue, really.

Anyhoo, whatever you want to call it, there's still the important unanswered question: why was the system taken offline? The answers of "to perform maintenance" or "to work on the code" just don't make any sense. As I've been trying to explain (since November, really): you don't need to take a server offline to update its code. You just don't. There's really only two reasons I can think of that would necessitate doing so:

1) There's such a severe problem with the system that making it unavailable is better than leaving it online while it's being fixed. (Contradicted by the fact that the system was left up and running for as long as it was; either the problem was known and the system was left running with it, or the problem wasn't known and thus there was no reason to take it down.)

2) The only place you can modify the code is on the live production server. Voice of IT experience: you don't do that. It's just such remarkably bad form to handle code in that manner that it's impossible to believe that a web-based company could survive this long while following such egregiously bad practices. You keep your code in a development environment, firewalled from being accessed by the Internet at large. You make your changes, then port the code to a test environment (also inaccessible to the Internet at large) to work out as many kinks as you can. Then - and only then - do you port to the live environment. But there is no reason to take the live environment offline while you do all that; if you're not having any major issues, there's no reason the older code can't be run on the live system until the new code is ready for production. (And if there is a major issue, we go back to the previous point.)

So, again, why was the system taken offline? If the claimed vulnerability did indeed exist, that would justify that decision, but then we hit the timeline problem: they announced it months ahead of time, so, if the vulnerability was the reason, why was the system not shut down immediately upon its discovery? If it wasn't discovered until after taking the system offline, for what reason was the system taken offline, since it shouldn't have been for routine code updates?

Lonely Codger

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ookami_hime_9603
okie just making sure I would feel bad

'sokay, we're all good. smile

Lonely Codger

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Busy Bunny
Quit squabbling about HOW it happened. It's gone, there's nothing we can do about it. Until people have solid proof of this crazy conspiracy it's all just rumors.

What would you consider "solid proof", though? Short of finding someone from Gaia willing to publicly admit what's actually going on behind the scenes (not likely any time soon), all we can really do is analyze what information we do have; said information includes Gaia's own official statements, which, as I've been trying to explain, simply don't match up with their actions. (Said information also includes some rudimentary knowledge of IT practices, which, naturally, not everyone is going to have, as most people don't/haven't/won't work in IT, which Gaia seems to be relying on in making their statements.) And as for why that's important, it's because a company that flat-out lies to its customers (for really no reason other than to try to make themselves look better) should be called out on it.

Sure, zOMG isn't coming back. I know that. (Actually, I knew that once they announced their "maintenance shutdown", but too many people were swearing by the veracity of their claims at that point to bother trying to raise the issue.) Still doesn't mean they should be dishonest to their customers with impunity, though.
You care about this stuff way too much. It was just a game, and not even a great one. Like I said, proof. Proof is facts and evidence, not feelings and assumptions. It does no good to get everyone riled up and argue online about something.

I care about the truth. I care about not being treated like I should be a gullible idiot by a company that wants me to give them money. Had Gaia been upfront about the whole situation from the beginning, I wouldn't be making a big deal out of it... or any deal at all, really. But instead they chose to obfuscate the truth, and rely on their users (customers) to not know enough about what they're saying to be able to tell the difference. Really, not only is it kind of insulting, it's also not to the benefit of their long-term viability as a company. (Then again, the CEO-who-shall-not-be-named seems to have a history of not caring about his companies' long-term viability, but that's a whole different topic...)

But as for facts and evidence, we have the statements Gaia staff has made about this issue and about zOMG in general. And we have the knowledge of trained and experienced IT professional(s). That's not "feelings" or "assumptions", that's also facts and evidence. That the only way Gaia's statements could work out is by doing blatantly terrible IT practices isn't an assumption or a feeling, it's based on observed experiences. (Let's put it this way: in a court proceeding - at least in the United States - "feelings" and "assumptions" aren't admissible evidence. Expert testimony - in this case, relating what procedures should and would be followed in ordinary circumstances - is. If it's good enough for the courts, it's good enough for a forum discussion.)

And I'm not trying to get anyone "riled up". As I said, I'm only interested in the truth. But if the only way to get at that truth is by pointing out the ways Gaia's statements contradict reality, that's what I'm gonna do.

Enduring Gaian

I gotta say though O.T.L. I'm amazed they didn't delete those statements like they did the Flynn's booty FAQ.

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