sell/giveaway this site

[melti]

^^ also speaking, we mean a better security system overall. thats what we have been saying for a week now, nonetheless, thank you Lacuna for giving us some insight. <3 much love to the staff

[lyney]

by my comment on staff, i was geared toward wishing for more admins- or an adjustment in the ability of lower staff, honestly. when the original heat of this discourse started on june 28th, a part of me felt regretful in watching the global moderators peeking at the chat because it felt as if this was something out of their power. more admins/admin assistants or an adjustment in power for lower staff could've possibly helped with more communication and the general handling of the entire situation. i think the briefness of it all is what caused for us as the playerbase to act up so much.

but aside from that, what about more coders? assisting in the website's production, while being outside of the staff's control, would bring about the change that this site so desperately needs. i know nick is trying his best, but so much lies on his shoulders from a site from 2008.. this was said in the 2020 thread, and it is a point again now that this all happened.

[Miss_Believer]

Very true. I’ve had accounts with the most hot garbage passwords be perfectly fine, but then have my accounts with actual hard to guess passwords have been compromised.

Any password can be compromised; it's not about the complexity of the password necessarily, but its uniqueness. If you used your hard to guess password in two places and one of them experienced a data breach, that password is useless forever.

Hi Lacuna! That makes a lot of sense! What I was more trying to get at there is sort of piggybacking off of what you outlined in your above post. If another sites data gets breached, depending on the breach, it sometimes gets traced back to other stuff (which is why I’ve seen it suggested on other sites data breaches to change passwords affiliated with any accounts associated with an email if that type of data is received).

Regardless, what I’m trying to say as well is sometimes stuff happens! And it’s not anyone’s fault! Sometimes even unique, non-reused passwords get compromised through ways that honestly probably make more sense to hackers than regular people! I’d agree with what you said that re-using passwords and not picking very strong ones isn’t the best practice.

[Sixx O'Clock]

I really do feel like there need to be more coders working on the site. The site is far bigger now than it was even just a few years ago, and as good a job as Nick does with coding, there's only so much one person can do, and only so fast they can do it. It would benefit the site much more to hire on at least one or two more coders, if only so that most timezones are covered, so even if Nick is asleep or unable to patch/fix things at a given time, someone else can pick up the slack.
Selling the site isn't a good move, in my opinion. Like people have said before, more often than not when a small site like CS gets bought by a different company, that company usually doesn't have the players' best interests in mind, and would rather make as much money as possible. Actually hiring and paying a couple more coders would be the best way to go. Of course, hiring some more mods wouldn't hurt either, but as Lacuna said, there's only so much mods can do.

[BARBOSSA]

Yeah, I feel like it's incredibly clear what is meant. This response also just feels incredibly passive aggressive, but maybe that's just me. There is One coder on the site exactly, and that's, again, being ignored. I'm sure your jobs as mods are hard, and maybe things were in motion before these threads, but considering many of these same threads existed previously, I would personally doubt that. Users outnumber staff, but that doesn't make users having to have waited a week for any real response any more okay.

[Infailia]

Very true. I’ve had accounts with the most hot garbage passwords be perfectly fine, but then have my accounts with actual hard to guess passwords have been compromised.

Regardless, I appreciate that we will see something be done about this.

It's also important to remember that password length is far more important than 'complexity'. Algorithms are often used to crack passwords, and they don't care if your password is a string of random characters of the names of all of your pets, it can't tell the difference. Longer passwords are harder to crack because with each additional character, the number of times the algorithm has to run increases.

As such, passwords of at least 15 characters are recommended. Upper case, lower case, and special characters don't matter, so do something you'll remember. Make sure to check your password against a list of frequently compromised passwords before using it. Finally, never use the same one twice; each additional time a password is used, the chance of it being compromised greatly increases.

[alexkralie]

i don't think they should just outright sell it and cease to have ANY involvement with it, but maybe if they could hire some coders...? i don't know, i just feel like after having a site like this for 15 years you might not want to just give it up entirely, and there could be big changes with new management that some of us may not like.

[Lacuna]

I feel like it's clear we meant coders when we say staff. it's been brought up SO many times that we need more coders, especially on this thread. It's shortsighted to assume that just any staff position is what we were asking for, when we've all been pretty specific. [/gen]
If anything we need more capable admins/admin assistants as well. And if things were truly being worked on, then WHY not make an announcement about that instead of remaining quiet up until now?
It still makes no sense how this can happen. There wasn't even an apology from any staff so far along the lines of "We are very sorry that we can't disclose information, but rest assured that we are working on things and trying our best."

I am clarifying because most posts explicitly say coders and staff and I genuinely wanted to make the distinction, as many people may not understand.

The way the site is run by its owners is not something I can speak on. It is the owner's choice if they hire more coders, and I honestly do not believe that a thread like this is bringing something to their attention that they are not aware of.

AAs are regular staff that handle certain issues that moderators do not, but that does not mean we have information beyond what moderators do. Nick did post that he was working on updates to the trade reversal system, and now has shared that he is working on further security updates. The announcement will be posted with as much detail as possible as soon as possible.

[ActualWoodelf]

I am clarifying because most posts explicitly say coders and staff and I genuinely wanted to make the distinction, as many people may not understand.

The way the site is run by its owners is not something I can speak on. It is the owner's choice if they hire more coders, and I honestly do not believe that a thread like this is bringing something to their attention that they are not aware of.

AAs are regular staff that handle certain issues that moderators do not, but that does not mean we have information beyond what moderators do. Nick did post that he was working on updates to the trade reversal system, and now has shared that he is working on further security updates. The announcement will be posted with as much detail as possible as soon as possible.

Thanks very much for the additional info and clarification, Lacuna! /gen

[illumié]

CS's security is not compromised; people are using other site's compromised security to prey on users who do not follow best practice of having unique passwords.

Just making this statement + "we have been actively working on improving the site's security and will continue to steadily do so in the days following" would have done so much to ease players minds while the hacks were occuring. I can't understand why this statement wasn't and still hasnt been made where general players can see it?