Hmm, I never noticed this old thread when it was first made.
Someone brought up this link in chat today. It's old, but I figured I'd answer the questions since someone was just now asking about it and as far as I know, I'm probably one of the only ones around anymore who knows most of the story. I apologize if I get any details wrong, but as best as I can remember the situation, this is what happened. I'm leaving a name or two out of this since the facts as I recall them are not entirely complementary to everyone involved. If you know the name(s), that's great, but I'd prefer to leave it off this thread. I'm just trying to set the record right about some forum history, not drag anyone's name through the muck, even though some might feel it would be deserved.
Many years ago lp101 used to be the main (and pretty much only) dedicated lockpicking forum that I knew of on the internet. After a few years a person who got banned from there decided to start a competing forum called EZ-Picking. I can't speak for the forum owners, but there was a lot of animosity between some members of the forums, including a few "forum wars" that erupted back and forth for a while, trying to deface sites, posting spam, etc. There were regular threads on EZ-Picking about the subject. I used both forums (and others), each had it's positive points and were useful information resources for me.
During this time I made a friend on the forums who went by CompFX online. He took detailed measurements of many lockpicking and auto-entry tools and converted them into CAD files. He also designed a lot of tools and made his tool designs and the CAD files available for free via an FTP site. He didn't ask any payment, merely that people leave his name on the files to give him credit for the many hours of work that it took.
Barbarian did get his username right, CompFX changed his online name to ILEx371 after he started lockpickology but I'm using his old name of CompFX throughout the narrative for consistency.
Two new lockpicking forums sprung up overseas, both of which appear to have taken his FTP files, stripped his name off everything, then posted all of it on their forums to try to get their forums started with some good content to bring people to their sites. This pissed off CompFX so he took down his FTP. Over several weeks he received MANY requests from people to please put the files back up again, and also requests to set it up as a forum so people could give feedback on the files make requests for specific tools to be converted into CAD files, etc.
He'd never started a forum before and asked me if I would be willing to help him get it off the ground. I don't know much about programming and tweaking the forum software, that was his domain. I basically came up with the front end of the site, the rules, an extensive FAQ, the structure, categories, etc. I came up with the name of the forum, Lockpickology, but honestly I didn't like it much. It's accurate, but it just doesn't roll off the tongue well. We brainstormed and had a list of a bunch of names we came up with and of all the ones that had a .com available for it, that one sounded the least lame, so it's what we went with. We worked for a few weeks loading the forum with all of his CAD files and tool designs as forum posts, each in it's applicable subforum.
Our goal was for it to be a well organized resource for both hobbyists and locksmiths. Up at the top of the page there was the forum name, then below that there was a navigation bar, pretty much just like there is on this forum page. But right below that there was a series of letters from A-Z across the page. We obtained the rights to an extensive locksmithing dictionary/encyclopedia so we could post it on the site, and when you clicked any of the letters it took you to the corresponding section of the dictionary, within the forum.
We also had a live chat box, pretty much like our chat room here except it was incorporated on the index page. As far as I know we were the first lock forum to do something like that, integrated into the forum.
During the process of setting up Lockpickology, EZ-Picking got hacked, defaced, and taken offline. Most suspect it was part of that ongoing forum war, but I have no proof either way. By then it appeared that the owner had essentially become an absentee owner and left it to an admin to run the forum. An admin who didn't seem to keep proper backups, so the forum was gone for good. CompFX took a lesson from that and made sure to keep the forum software patched, and keep good backups.
The admin from EZ-Picking now had no forum to run, but CompFX had announced there before the EZ crashed that he was setting up a forum to make his files available to download again, so people knew another forum would be coming online soon. CompFX told me that the lonely admin pestered him for a couple weeks to be brought onboard as an admin on Lockpickology, so to shut him up he would be bringing him on for a while to see if he was helpful.
For several weeks our new admin worked alongside. He had some ideas, but CompFX told me he would come to him with an idea but had no idea how to implement it in the forum software. Every single thing he wanted to do, he'd have to have CompFX do it for him, pulling him away from the stuff he was trying to work on. In the end the new admin mostly just worked on cut-and-pasting dictionary entries into the corresponding pages on the forum, for the few letters he'd been assigned to work on in the dictionary.
Lockpickology was live by now and things ran more or less smoothly on the forum. It wasn't busy, but got steady daily traffic initially, while we were finishing up the process of installing the last bits of the dictionary.
At least up until I got an email from someone else I knew from the forums. This person told me he'd been sworn to secrecy and invited to join a new forum but only on the condition that he not divulge the forum to myself or CompFX. This piqued his interest, so he agreed but with no intention of keeping it secret. It was a ludicrous concept anyway, in a small world like hobby lockpicking, trying to keep two very active members from discovering a publicly available forum. I think it stayed secret for a bit over a week after it went live. This friend told me the domain name:
http://www.keypicking.com
and I checked it out. As far as I could tell from the visible portion of the site, it was an IDENTICAL copy of Lockpickology.com except the change of the name on the banner. If forwarded this to CompFX, who was still upset about his CAD files getting passed around without any credit, and he was LIVID. He immediately banned the account of our 3rd wheel, the former admin from the defunct forum.
Well, within hours Lockpickology was defaced, then taken down altogether. From what CompFX told me, it appeared that the banned admin had made an extra account before being given the boot, and had given it admin access but managed to hide that it had admin privileges. It was with this account that the site was "hacked". Luckily CompFX had good backups and we were back up and running within hours, only having lost a day's worth of posts. He scoured the user accounts, found a couple more hidden admin accounts, deleted them and we had no further problems. I joined Keypicking to say hello in the chat room. I think there were something like 13 or 14 other members on this forum at the time, and about the only existing posts aside from what had been "borrowed" from Lockpickology was a joke thread and a new Warez subforum. I think the average forum member age was in the early teens and the resulting drama earned this forum the nickname "kiddie picking" in it's early days.
Around this time I also got involved in NDE Magazine. CompFX kept me on as an admin on Lockpickology but mostly he was handling day to day operation of the forum. I helped publish issue #2 of NDE Mag and Schuyler asked me to run it starting with issue #3. On the NDE website there were a couple requests to be able to discuss articles or leave questions for authors of articles. Schuyler was doing the layouts for NDE Mag but said he didn't want to get tied up running a forum. I mentioned it to CompFX and he offered to set up an NDE Magazine subforum on the Lockpickology domain, so as an experiment we did an issue of the magazine with hotlinks in the pdf for every artlcle to take you directly to the forum post for that article if you had a question or wanted to discuss it.
On a related note, a previous admin of lp101 saw the hotlinks as soon as the first issue which contained them was released. He contacted us to ask why we were hosting NDE forums on Lockpickology and not on what he considered the "main" lockpicking forum: lp101. I told him CompFX had offered to do all the work, so we were trying this as an experiment. He literally demanded that we immediately move the NDE forums onto lp101. I told him I wasn't going to stab CompFX in the back after he put all the work into it, so we were banned from discussing NDE Magazine on lp101, effective immediately. It ended up being a moot point anyway, we did the forum links in... I think it was maybe 2 issues, I forget for sure. But it was like a graveyard. There was hardly any traffic coming over from NDE Mag, despite the requests for a venue to discuss articles. It surprised me since there were tens of thousands of downloads of NDE Magazine every month. I would have figured there would have been at least a little bit more interest in the forum links. Squelchtone has lightened things up there considerably since he took the reigns of lp101 so I doubt the ban against NDE Magazine is still in force, although the magazine has been dead for years.
Lockpickology slowed down, spam would get posted and not be deleted for days in the NDE forum that was accessible to non-registered users, new member registrations for the original Lockpickology part of the forum would languish and never get activated. I'd had to step away a couple months previously to take care of a family member with health problems so I didn't even see this stuff going on until someone told me about it. CompFX seemed reluctant to bring anyone new onboard to help him after being stung previously. Eventually the forum died. I contacted him after I heard about the problems and he said he no longer had the time to keep it running day-to-day due to personal issues. By the time I thought of asking him if he'd be willing to transfer the domain or give me copies of the site backups he had some heavy stuff he was dealing with and had stopped responding to phone calls or emails. CompFX, if you ever find this forum post, please email me. While I'd love to get a copy of all the work we did, even if you don't still have the forum data , I'd like to at least know if you're doing OK.
Keypicking continued to grow but had to take down the dictionary after the guy who owned the rights to the dictionary saw he was hosting it on a forum other than the one he'd given the rights to publish it and I was told he threatened to sue him. The forum owner also took down the CompFX CAD files but I was not privy to the conversations that resulted in that move. After a couple years the original forum owner passed it to HC who did some good work cleaning things up, literally and figuratively. He removed the warez section which would have ended up getting the site shut down. He brought elbowmacaroni on as forum admin and they did a good job of cleaning things up, attracting more members of the lockpicking community and also a lot of professional locksmiths as well. There was some drama involved in that whole changing of the guard, but it's not my story to tell. Elbow can post it here if he wants to. But it's a sore topic so don't go asking for it. He'll see this post and chime in if he wants to.
The whole thing is ironic to me. This forum gets started by (apparently) ripping off another forum, which I had helped start. Then after a while I end up as half owner of this forum (along with Elbowmacaroni) after the one dies that I had helped get going in the first place.
Statistics: Posted by MBI — Sun Apr 26, 2015 12:10 am