Eh? WTF?

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/125326.html?thread=83019150#t83019150

It's not clear exactly what happened here, but why would a staffer choose to make a random comment on an entry using their staff account? How did they even find their journal? As far as I can tell what happened is that the staff person does admit to leaving a comment on an entry which was in 'bad taste' and then deleting it, but then it's unclear whether the entry was locked (as the person alleges) or not (as the staff member alleges).

More disturbing are the allegations made by this person, although they admit to 'trolling' in the past, so they might not be a reliable source. However... do volunteers really have the ability to see locked posts? Or is it only closed support requests?

Comments

[mark]

Which is also not just that simple. Calling editevent takes more than a passing knowledge of the code, and doing it manually wouldn't be as easy as you might think due to having to tangle with memcache.

Now, it's possible that he impersonated the user, changed the security, logged back in as himself, commented, re-impersonated the user, changed the security back, then went back as himself and deleted the comment...

But really, Occam's Razor has a thing or two to say about that idea.

[yvi]

Which is also not just that simple.

No, just easier than inserting a comment, I would think.

And as far as I understand vulva, the security of the entry was set to public when she saw the comment, so if it was externally changed it was never set back to the custom friends group.

It's all just speculation anyway, as there is no way this will ever be cleared up :/ I certainly don't trust dnewhall in this.

[mark]

Okay, I agree with you -- doing one is certainly easier than the other, technically, and we can posit an entire chain of events by which someone could technically accomplish what is being described.

[azurelunatic]

The plural of anecdote is not data, especially not for something like this, but I stopped speaking to an ex-boyfriend after a drama-laden incident in which he made a series of bad, improbable, but very real decisions that left me disinclined to trust him further.

He was babysitting a child of my household (my then-roommate had a son) and had physical access to my unsecured laptop. This had never previously been an issue.
I had left my laptop with an active login session to LJ, with open browser tab on my own journal. This had never previously been an issue.
He saw that I had made a private post, behind a cut, with a title indicating a chatlog with another ex-girlfriend of his.
Out of all of the several private chatlogs posted in there, he opened that one and read it.
From the chat log, he learned that she'd been on a date.
This is where the story jumps from the merely shameful to the truly ridiculous.
He (somehow, she was vague on the details when telling me about this somewhat later) cracked into her journal (she lived out of state, and he did not have physical access to her machine), and read (probably among other things) a filtered entry where she discussed having been on the date.
He added himself to the custom friends group.
He logged into his own journal and commented on the filtered entry (either that, or used the alternate login thing).
He logged back into her journal (if he didn't use alt-login to start with) and removed himself from the filter.
I shall omit the details of the social fallout from the narrative, because while they're amusing in a popcorn.gif sort of way, they're not at all relevant to the generally ridiculous concept of the hoops this guy jumped through for the sole purpose of leaving a bitchy comment to his ex's entry. It was ridiculous, and I have no idea why he went to so much trouble, but the fact remains that he did go to that much trouble to act like a complete idiot.

(People who are allowed to use a computer of mine not under my direct supervision are now expected to use a guest account.)