Need some advice

Nerbert

Active member
An admin I appointed about a year and a half ago just took over my forum and banned me. It was all over a disagreement on moderation policies.

The bad news is I made the mistake of letting him register the domain name.

What the heck do I do?
 
First thing is to get back control of your site.

Assuming you have FTP access, you can access and edit the config.php file. In it you should see:

Code:
$config['superAdmins'] = 'X';
where X is a user profile number (by default user #1). Change that number to your user ID and remove any other numbers. That will make you a super administrator and remove anyone else from being a super administrator that was listed there.

You will now be able to log into the ACP. You can remove this admin and ban him. Also remove anyone else who is a super administrator. You, the site owner, should only ever be a super administrator. Anyone else should only ever be administrators. Only super administrators can add or remove other administrators.

As for your domain name, unless you can negotiate a transfer from this person, which may be unlikely, you have lost it and he could point it to another website, so yours would effectively disappear. Your only solution if he won't transfer it is for you to buy another domain and then point that at your current XenForo installation. You will also have to update your domain in the XenForo customer area.
 
And if you are on shared hosting with the domain provider that he has the account for, then you better grab the DB and files ASAP because if he changes the panel password and/or removes your access then you also will lose the site (posts, users, etc).
If you have the hosting service yourself, it's time to register a new domain and then quickly put up an index.html with a redirect to the new domain - which would work until he moves that old domain hosting to another server. On the index.html you could post a notice of why they are being redirected and then have it pause long enough to let users read it then send them to your new domain.

Found the below that you could use as a starting example.
Code:
<html>
<body>
Our site has moved to a new domain.  You will be redirected there in 15 seconds.  Please update your bookmarks.<br>
    <div id="counter">15</div>
    <script>
        setInterval(function() {
            var div = document.querySelector("#counter");
            var count = div.textContent * 1 - 1;
            div.textContent = count;
            if (count <= 0) {
                location.href="https://example.com";
            }
        }, 1000);
    </script>
</body>
</html>
 
Last edited:
Sorry I didn't get back on this. I managed to inform some other members outside the forum and they persuaded him to restore me. Or maybe he just came to his senses. Anyway I have a new tech administrator and they've just transferred the site over to his account. Since I know nothing about server operation I have had another admin handle it all under his own account. This rogue admin seemed to be OK at first but then kinda lost it. The new guy seems completely trustworthy. But just to be sure I'm having him teach me some of the basics of server management.
 
Yeah, the new guy wants to put everything in my name. It's just been my instinct to keep ownership with whoever best knows what to do with it. Coding is the only area I have any competence in so I had planned on a division of labor but I think I need to branch out into new area of knowledge here.
 
I'm not bugging this new guy for details right now. The move is quite complicated as the old admin had set up automatic backups, some sort of fine tuning in configuration and so forth. I'm just going to stay out of the way for now. The new guy sends me updates from time to time and the less I understand what he's saying the more confidence I have in his expertise.
 
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