Admins herp derps too!

So, I'm always amused by the war stories of administrators and members alike. There's usually a few good tales to be told, and it's been a while since I've taken the time to stop and laugh at them.

There's no such thing as an admin that gets things right every single time; old admins make mistakes on long-lived boards just as much as new admins muck things up on their fresh new projects. It's also pretty easy to get down on yourself when you screw something up, so if you're in that place now -- or if you've ever been there, or if you just want some confirmation that the often-amazing and god-like people who run stupidly successful boards are still human... well, here's a thread to read. XD

Please share your epic cases of derp herping, that we may all laugh at the insanity of human error. :D

My latest case comes from Tally's birthday celebrations. Every year, for six years, I've brought the OOC Party Room out of hiding, enabled guest posting, posted a birthday message, and a few fun threads for the members to participate in. You'd think I have that down by now, right?

Nine days after the birthday, I finally realised that there was a reason only my staff were posting in there. It wasn't that the members didn't care, or couldn't be bothered... they couldn't see the forum. Some smart person had set the forum viewable to admins only. XD

Permissions fail, well done Mousie. Derps herped.

I once accidentally deleted an application that was about 9,000 words. Luckily, they had it saved, but I was still mortified.

and just a while ago, I did a ton of advertising, sat back and was like 'but where are the people?' after a few hours... Realized the 'register' button didn't lead anywhere, and neither did parts of the ad.

On the derp herping of advertising. I spent a whole afternoon putting our ad out there only to realize about 100 ads later that I was using the wrong ad for the site. GO ME!

Oooo I have an advertising one! I run two sites and I was posting an ad for one of them. I copied and pasted the code for the right one but then typed in the name of my other. Epic fail!

Hehe, that is what I had been doing.

I've screwed up... a lot.

• During my first advertising spree, it took over an hour for me to realize that the site name was misspelled in the ad.
• The First Links board on my site wasn't guest friendly for several weeks.
• I've posted using the wrong account multiple times.
• I once spent several minutes refreshing my board multiple times, trying to figure out why the staff board wasn't showing up. After I complained to a co-admin, I realized I wasn't logged in.

- A skinner put two </form> tags. No one could log in or register

- I put a *@gooeyhotlove.* in my email filters and no one could register because wildcards weren't that comprehensive

- An admin friend sends out monthly emails about their site - but there aren't ever any links to the site in the emails

- A site moves but doesn't list the new URL (this happens SO often!)

- Guest-viewable, guest-encouraged adoptables section but no way for guests to PM/post/notify anyone of their interest (happens SO often)

I once put Remnants of the Earth's skin on Spirits of the Earth. Some people were confused as to why SotE had suddenly gone futuristic.

I've accidentally deleted a completely active person's account before! That was fun. >__>

I had all the updates in my top bar listed as being from March, even though we had opened in May. I can see why we got all of those "is this site active?" questions now.

I've done that. The SN was very similar to the person I meant to delete.

In AvidGamers, I messed up the coding in updating the member's profile. A new member with an interesting looking character had his detailed char info disappear. I found and fixed the mistake quickly, but the player left us. Can't say I blame him.

Well, for awhile there I was such a menace at accidentally deleting stuff, my co-admin banned me from moving threads. He really didn't have to. I'd already made myself so paranoid about it I was afraid to touch a thread to do anything besides post in it.

I have a few. I was posting an ad for my rpg on this really popular horse rpg, pasted the little bit of code, and hit enter/reply only to find out I posted a Youtube url. I was so mortified and tried asking if an admin was on to delete it but I decided to just retreat and ignore it like it never happened.

Back when I just beginning, I was moving the character app folder to a new one in this process that required some messing around with code or something. I remember moving it and then someone alerts me that all the profiles are gone. I scramble around, in full panic mode, and find that the board with the apps are still there, just not showing. Got that fixed.

Last one isn't too big. I just made a mistake in putting ranks up while accepting two characters. I made character A what character B was supposed to be, and character B be character A. Character A's player alerted me and it got fixed pretty quickly. Still highly embarrassing.

1. One of the mods I tried stopped anyone from accessing my board until I deleted it.
2. I once made the cbox scroll. I still have no idea how I did it.
3. I once duplicated my site's sidebars so that we had two identical sidebars side by side.

Yeah, I'm a terrible coder.

I was pretty young ( 11ish) and helped out with a large horse sim game. I was updating their registries and (this was when geopages was still popular) my internet crashed. They lost all their horse registry stuff so I went into deluxe hiding. I picked out a new name, new email, etc. I look back on it with regret, nowadays I would have fessed up to it. I'm sure they think it was some elaborate plot by somebody from a rival game to come in and munch all their info to pieces because I disappeared, but the past is gone and there isn't much to do but learn from it.

<//<; I've given too much as a reward in contests. It was supposed to be choice one and instead it was take all. I had to rush over and PM everyone about the mistake. XD;

I can think of a few derps my fellow staff did on board as well. I've had a couple of mods score threads but typo and give vastly too much for them. Like, generally we give about .1 DEP(our experience on our board). There was someone on staff who was trying to give .04 DEP... and ended up giving .4 DEP. O.o Likewise, another staff was trying to give .025 DEP and accidentally gave .25. XD; Even one of our own admins tried to give me 2.5 and 1.5 for an awesome solo. I corrected her pretty fast cause I knew that wasn't right.

I actually had a moderator break our site using her SIGNATURE. XD We have no idea what she was trying to do but our admin at the time had to go in and edit her signature from the ACP. She was cool about it and everything and didn't mind that I started calling her ChibiSomnia. XD At the time, the main bad guy on our site was a Hacker called Insomnia.

I'm struggling to think of mistakes I may have done... but I'm completely blanking. I'm pretty sure that means that they were just so horrible that I've blocked them. XD;;; Generally, though, if I make a mistake, its a drama-esque one involving members and misconceptions... not really technical mistakes because I'm incredibly anal about not messing it up.

I have make mistakes during the site upgrades and messed up there. Then had to get support to be rescued!

I have missed people's names off the safe list for the Activity Check. (And corrected it and was terribly embarrassed in the process.)

That's all I can think of for now. But there have been a few.

When one of my sites in the past was first starting, we had a thread that everyone was in. It was several pages and on-going. And then while I was making updates to the board (re-arranging them)... I accidentally deleted it.



I'm pretty sure I started hearing an angry mob with pitchforks after I sent the site-wide PM explaining my incompetence as an administrator.

I suppose the only one I can think of would be that I somehow disabled new registrations....while I ran my big advertising spree. Yep. That's right. I basically teased anyone who might have possibly wanted to join. You can laugh now. XD