Who's in charge here? A very embarrassing moment over at J. Crabb's forum

So there I was posting something mildly annoying at the 'Degree Information DL" site, about the Rev. Hill apparently being banned here, and some anonymous person there made reference to me being a Forum Administrator here.

Before my annoyance level had risen too far, I checked the URL he provided
http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showgroups.php
and by golly, there I am as a Forum Administrator, along with Kristin Hirst, Jonathan Whatley, Nathan, natestone, sourav, Chip, bgossett, and Bruce.

For the record, I am not now, and never have been an administrator here. I hope and trust this URL will be corrected post haste.

John Bear

 

So it is your testimony that you are merely a fellow traveler, just a dupe and tool of the forum administrator world conspiracy?

 

Going. going, gone!

 

You are saying then that Reverend Ray Hill was mistaken when he said that you banned him from DegreeInfo because that would somehow magically increase the sales on your books?

Well I'm for one glad that we were able to clear up part of that little mystery. The other part that I'm still unclear on though is how could banning the not so good Reverend Ray Hill from this forum increase the sale of any book anywhere? Oh well I guess that I'll have to remain ignorant in the mysterious ways of some magic.

 

No, commant.

 

Back when I created degreeinfo in January of 2001 or so, I knew that I couldn't manage everything myself, and so I initially gave admin privileges to several of the trusted folks from a.e.d.... people that I'd met in person, had extensive discussions with, or otherwise that I felt comfortable trusting with the difficult task of moderating this board.

John Bear was initially included in that group, but almost immediately (within perhaps a day) he emailed back and asked to be removed as an administrator, because he wanted his role to be just one of observer. I made the configuration change in his user profile, but at the time I was not very familar with the software we were using at the time (UBB) and apparently I did not remove him from the administrator's group.

When we ported from UBB to VBulletin in 2002, VBulletin inherited the user settings from UBB, and we never rechecked them.

I had honestly completely forgotten that he'd ever been set up as an admin, since he'd never actually done any moderation on the board, so I was as surprised as anyone when the admiinistrator group list showed him (as well as a number of others who have long left active participation) as an administrator.

I've since cleaned up the admin group and removed all the people that aren't active admins (basically, Bruce, Bill, (if he still exists), myself, and my business partners.)

So hopefully that answers any questions.