[Sebguer]

Okay, Holmes here again. Kind of bothered that this has become a 'defend the hiring practices of a game that was maliciously attacked', but alright. Blame-the-victim is in style in all sorts of ways! We should've dressed like less of a slut, of course.

JDK was a player for a fair bit of time before he applied to staff. He applied to staff at a time where we were having significant instability due to back-end access, and our lead programmer (and competent coder/experienced server administrator) had very recently stepped away from the game suddenly. Neither HAL, nor I, (the two people who were engaged in the day-to-day administering of the game) were very experienced in the world of MUD administration, and neither of us are programmers. In terms of hiring a coder and letting them actually make changes to the game (changes which we had a compelling need for), granting them the access that JDK was given was the ONLY way to do this to our knowledge and experience level.

In defense of this practice, I'd like to point out that JDK had this access for almost a year. As you can see, we hired him in October of 2011. He showed no signs of malicious behavior (though, hey, maybe he'll post again and tell me all sorts of wicked deeds that he did while he was working for us) for the duration of his officially being an administrator. He didn't do much work, either, really, but that's what you get with volunteers and it wasn't a terribly worrisome fact. Regardless, the issue here wasn't that he had access, it's that he was allowed to persist in having access after having (amicably, as far as I know) departed staff. This was, and I don't think anyone will deny it, a mistake and an oversight. However, this hardly excuses the man's actions- and the idea that because we gave out this access, which may or may not have been necessary, we deserved for our server to get attacked is patently ridiculous.

As for the requirement to compile SoI's codebase, yeah. It was a 'basic competency' requirement.