Seems like somebody used to own and use the system user. Anyone know who this is?
I honestly have no idea who that is, it seems like they’re one of the higher-ups on here though especially given that shield by their name.
Per a quote, looks like someone by the username of WheelockSignals13:
Posts made using the “system” username are remnants of the changeover from phpBB to Discourse, and various posts made by different people appear to have been posted under the “system” username. I’m not entirely sure why, but if the forum database cannot find the specific author of a post, it uses the “system” username.
I think the inability to find post authors might have to do with the catastrophic server failure in 2016. I’ve seen several posts from my original account that was lost to the crash reappear after the migration, which were not visible prior. I assume the same happened to other accounts lost in the failure, and that WheelockSignals13 was one of the lost accounts given that date of the post
Back in the phpBB days it was actually possible to view posts from these users by searching with the numeric user ID - the posts still existed in the database, but were not easy to access until the migration revealed them.
I wonder if it’s possible for an admin to link “lost” posts to the users’ current accounts…
Moderators have access to change the ownership of any post, although the scale of what would be required to fix all these posts wouldn’t be worth the effort. Even if we coded some sort of migration to fix it, I really don’t see the benefit of taking the time to do that either.
If you have any posts you want transferred to your account please contact us, provided you are the original poster.