See its down as Fade must be trying to merge the forums...

I believe that Ixabert's IP could have been faked by anyone who admins a forum which Ixabert has previously posted on. Anyone who knew Ixabert's IP could have faked it. It should certainly be pointed out that an evasive person could do this. The real task here is to then make up a story of how the archive got to us.

We need to pin this on someone who is anti-Ixabert, though IX and I are fighting a bit, I don't think pinning it on me would be intelligent as I am associated with the lyceum and we weren't fighting at the time.

yes, in fact, that seems the biggest gap in our story. Any suggestions?

Who hates Ixabert? We need a list of people who dislike Ixabert, and then we should weigh the pros and cons of each potential choice.

LWB is a scopevision mod and probably has Ixabert's IP, but I wouldn't want to personally destroy my seemingly friendly relationship with him.

Fuck it we should make LWB the fall guy/patsy. That would make our story complete.

Frank and Prak Stal are good people to frame. Both were alleged to be behind my framing on inverted world (which I refuted), and both dislike Ixabert.

Ogenoct is also a mod, as is Repeal17thAmendment (not a supermod).

No, frank and prak nobody would believe.

We need someone who was in the middle of this all, and is suspicious as is.

Big Vinny is a good choice. He obviously knew about the hack, and was one of the first people to get access to the mod lounge. In addition, we are angry with him, so we shouldn't care too much about severing the relationship, it is already broken. To make things even more realistic, he recently was banned from the phora for a month, and has reasons to be anti-phora. He also fits the psychological profile of a hacker IMO.

We can't all suggest this, one person has to suggest it and a few of us have to initially doubt him. After a little debate, scripted debate, we should agree.

Let's assess the pros and cons of Johnson being our scapegoat:

Pros:
1. Johnson has loyalties to nobody
2. Johnson has reasons to dislike the Phora
3. Johnson dislikes Ixabert, myself, shays, kane, etc. He seems to have an amicable relationship with Mazdak and I'm not sure his attitudes towards MorsTriumphalis
4. Johnson is pretty nihilistic, so he wouldn't be held back by any type of moral qualms or interest in privacy
5. Johnson's an ass
6. We can say we banned Johnson on account of him trying to blackmail us by virtue of his committing the hack (or something along these lines), hence lending legitimacy to our story using this piece of evidence

Cons:
1. Johnson will outright deny this
2. As stated before, Johnson has no particular motivation to help us
3. Only circumstancial evidence regarding his character/internet psychology make him an even remotely possible candidate. We could fabricate some sort of evidence to make him appear as the guilty party, but if others don't buy into this from the get go, we're pretty much screwed.
4. Johnson's own reputation wouldn't substantiate that he would keep this in confidence, especially after us banning him. Why was this not leaked before?

I'm sure there are more, but this is what comes to mind right now.

Remember, Johnson isn't "Helping" us, besoshvilli, he is hurting us by pretending to be Ixabert. He hates both of the forums.

Johnson is a scumbag, I agree with making him the fall guy.

To accuse Johnson or prac of hacking my account would be ludicrous. No one would believe that for a moment.

The accusation is that they hacked Starr's account, and used a proxy which resembled your ip address.

Even more ludicrous. But I'm glad we are thinking about this. Try to think of something more plausible.

Right, but how then do we explain that we got our hands on the mod-lounge info? It seems implausible that Johnson was that much of a schemer: hacking starr's account as Ixabert, then turning the info over to us so we could conveniently use it just to substantiate in the minds of others that it was ixabert all along, and THEN it remains amongst the accusations that we did in fact hack starr's account it is only now that we accuse johnson. I think it's too late to simply outright blame it on someone in this way.

Rather, my line of thinking was that we'd find a scapegoat who did the hacking for us, presented us with the info, we admit that we thought it would be useful, took it from him and protected his identity for the time being. Then, when he became no longer useful we identified him publicly because the accusations regarding our responsibility for the hack were becoming more and more bothersome. Obviously this would need to be fine tuned, but it lends itself at least it covers some gaps. It explains how we got it, it explains how we were NOT directly responsible for the hack (nor its commission), and can also explain why we are late giving out this information. The problem remains with ixabert's IP, but we can hold onto the argument that flak has no real evidence, that it was doctored, for the reasons explained by Morstriumphalis. Just an idea.

We need the story with the least amount of holes, and that doesn't outright contradict ANY previous stories we've told before.