[pavel_lishin]

I host a general-interest VBulletin forum, which at one point had something like a hundred people posting. One day, we discovered that via the "groups" functionality, there was a whole parasitic forum co-existing with ours - we didn't know it existed, we didn't know any of the people there, and they didn't know us, and the two groups didn't interact at all.

I wonder if it's possible for something similar to happen on specific-interest a messaging board, but just as a function of time zones. (e.g., somehow, most of the population of the board is from Spain and New Zealand, 12 hours apart.)

[irl_zebra]

Can you expand on what you were saying about a co-existing forum? I don't think I understand what you mean, but I'm intrigued.

[cosmie]

It sounds like a group of people abused the Social Group feature of vBulletin[1] to piggyback off of his forum to have their own little area without having to host their own forum/server. Depending on how vBulletin is configured, you can basically create a wholly independent forum within the Social Group that can't be accessed/seen outside of the group.

[1]http://www.myth-weavers.com/wiki/index.php/Help:VBulletin:So...

[pavel_lishin]

Yup, I believe that's what they used. It's a documented feature, but one that I was completely unfamiliar with. I also opened registration, but wasn't monitoring new signups.

There wasn't any harm to it, but it's definitely something that can slip by an insufficiently wary admin.