An Explanation

[Secura]

King Jan had reported on a few occasions in the past that he has had issues with his account, principally PMs were sent and posts made to members and areas that he himself did not visit; this was investigated by Tosa at the time but did not go further than password changes due to Warman being permanently banned at the time anyway.

This time around it was the staff who noticed inconsistencies in the King Jan posts and messages sent to staff, but there was reluctance to suspend an innocent member based on assumptions and insinuations. Thus, we attempted to inform Jan by resetting his password and emailing him that he could log in at any time and change it at his discretion. Unfortunately, it appears his email had been compromised as well because the inconsistencies continued.

This led to an issue where we are unable to contact the original owner of the account and we still remained divided on how to resolve the situation. A suggestion was put forward to check the messages sent by the account since the reset was made, which I grudgingly agreed to and thus was enacted by TinCow; had I said 'no', the messages would not have been read. Following my permission being given, the user on the account was confirmed to be Warman which gave grounds for suspension of the compromised account as an alt of a permabanned member and ensured that we were not inflicting punishment upon an innocent victim; suspension also allowed the account to be reaccessed by the original owner at such a time as he could prove access was his and his alone.

The whole process was handled with upmost care solely by TinCow, checking only those messages sent since the password reset in order to confirm suspicions and to respect King Jan's privacy. The little joke in my initial PM about Andres was from Blackadder Goes Forth and was intended to lighten the situation and highlight that PMs are still very much private. The unwillingness of many staff members, myself included, to suspend an innocent forum member without solid evidence and no alternative is the reason this action was taken; we have no intention nor desire to make this Org policy. It was an exception rather than the rule and will never happen again, unless required via a court order.