Feedback Report of altered URL's

Hi Folks,

We've received a very serious report from a member that they believe the URL's in some of their posts seem to have been altered.

Although we don't have a record of this, we take this member at their word that their URL's were altered as they are a credible member.

The person on the Admin team that was dealing with this member is no longer with us, so this is not something we can check and resolve internally, and therefore ask all members to please check their posts for any URL's that may have been altered, and to bring them to our attention in this thread.

There is another possible explanation for this which is that we use a URL parsing script to "delink" active URL's which may have altered the links during the automated delinking process. We will look into this further as well.

However, since the member that brought this to our attention believes it was done for punitive reasons by the person on the Admin team they were interacting with and we have no way of asking that person about it since they are no longer with us, we felt we should mention it may have been them for the sake of full transparency since it is a possibility.

Regardless of what the cause was, we need to understand the extent of this problem and if it is widespread or just an isolated incident to determine how best to fix it t.

If the person that brought this to our attention would like to provide more details or to post in this public thread, then they are welcome to. We did not want to violate their privacy without their permission which is why we have not posted their member name.

We look forward to everyone's feedback on this matter and apologize for this as it is contrary to what we stand for. Please use this thread to keep our entire Admin Team in check now and in the future if any such alterations ever occur.

Best regards,
The GamblingForums.com Team

 

We are taking you at your word that your URL's were altered, and we were the ones that made this matter public in this thread in order to be fully transparent and to find out from other members if the issue is widespread, but we don't have evidence of that alteration on our end because if the former Admin team member did indeed alter the URL in your post to make it not work, then they did not leave a record of it.

This is why we are asking folks to please go through their post histories to see if any URL's were altered and to post them here so that we can determine the extent of this issue and if it's isolated to your case or more wide-spread.

We do not see any evidence that any of your actual post content was ever edited in any way, so if anything other than URL's were altered in your posts, then please let us know here ASAP.

We understand that the removal of your URL feels like censorship, but please note that we have a very strict link policy (one of the strictest of any gambling forum), this is why your URL was removed when you brought this matter to our attention today as the former team member should have never allowed it unilaterally. We do remove links frequently (it's one of our most common moderation tasks) and even have the automated script mentioned previously to go through posts to delink URL's since most links violate our rules, but we never edit non-URL post content that changes the meaning of someone's post in any way, and if anyone finds any evidence of this then please bring it to our attention in this thread immediately because that would be even more serious.

We are not denying this (since we have no way to confirm or deny on our end whether this indeed happened and take you at your word), so all we can do at this point beyond apologizing if your URL was indeed altered by one of our Admin team members (or the delinking script) is to attempt to see the extent of any damage done and to fix it, while attempting to investigate how this person did alter your URL's if they did indeed do so in order to be able to implement changes that do not make this possible.

We completely understand that this matter would affect your trust in our site and if you therefore choose to no longer participate here. Please note that this is the first time since our inception 6 years ago that one of our Admin team members has been accused of editing a post in this way, and from what you are saying, it was only the URL in your post and not the actual post content. If we edited member posts on a regular basis, then we believe this would have been brought to light a long time ago by several members, yet this is the first report we've received like this. You are a valued member of our community, so it would be a loss to our community if you no longer participate here but hope our efforts to give you the benefit of the doubt, not deny it, apologize sincerely, act quickly, be open and transparent about it, investigate it to see how a former Admin team member would be able to do what you mentioned without leaving a trace, and fix any potential loopholes, will convince you to give us another chance.

For the rest of the members, please post here if you have noticed any alterations in the URL's in your posts (other than URL's that were delinked or "[removed]" for violating our rules), and especially if you notice any non-URL edits of your posts at all. Please post here even if you are not 100% sure but suspect you have a post that may have been edited. We do not believe it is likely that this issue is widespread at all, but please let us know ASAP if you find any such altered posts so that we can be absolutely certain since we have no direct way of checking on our end since there is no trace we can follow.

Thank you.