I'm very anxious to hear the explanation from Sphinn regarding the re-opening of this post:

http://sphinn.com/story/79700

Thanks for pointing that out, seomofo. I'd never seen that. I'll pass it along to the tech folks, but if I had to guess, closed comment threads were probably reopened during the development or launch of the new platform. Seems about the same time as all that conversion from pligg to the new system.

And I should add ... if you or anyone ever has questions or sees odd things happening on the site, we're just an email away. No sense holding on to stuff and getting overly anxious.

Matt, I seriously doubt that is what happened... Occam's razor and all that good stuff. The fact that an employee of that company would just happen to stumble upon that thread in the small window of the software upgrade, and a feature of that upgrade was to allow posting of comments in previously closed threads, and they decided to leave said comment nine months after the conversation ended, all just seems like a bit of a stretch to me. :)

However it happened, it proves that SEOMoz is being more than deceptive - they're attempting to manipulate the story rather than get honest, and that in turn proves that they're either completely lying about themselves actually having the capability to do what they say in terms of processing data, or that if they do have the capacity now, they're finally shown to be a corporate sham who tramples the rights of individual web site owners for pure profit motive.  Either way, it stinks.  As far as the injected comment, that is a serious concern about the integrity of Sphinn, the one site I've until now, held in completely high regard.

I expect however, it was more likely one person in the Sphinn realm with the right access authority to help a friend which puts that one person in the crapper and I hope they get canned.  Publicly.  So that Sphinn can restore it's good name and reputation.

Hmm...I'm interested in the explanation for the closed thread to mysteriously open and then close again too!

It would make sense if all closed threads were open after the upgrade, but in that case, how did it get closed again?

For anyone who's wondering, Mods here don't have the ability to open and close topics (at least as far as I can tell from my modding). Only admins do.

Since I posted my comment it's been pointed out that it could have been a Sphinn admin was just lied to and innocently allowed the addition.  If that's the case, it's still a very bad sign - that someone could be so easily duped, in a way that only that ONE comment was allowed to be added, from a 3rd party that had financial stake in the thread.  Either way, as an industry we need to know what happened.

Hi All - first of all, thanks Mike/Darren for pointing out what is clearly an error in some data here at Sphinn. That had not been noted previously, and in investigating what happened, I've discovered a rather serious data burp that happened during our migration from the old platform to the new.

In addition to that comment on that article, there are 1,530 *other* records sharing that same timestamp incorrectly. These are not actually comments, but are desphinns that were incorrectly imported. I hate to disappoint all the conspiracy theorists out there - but there was no admin intervention, no secret opening of the thread then closing it again. It's just munged data. And it's being corrected.

Some other examples (of desphinns appearing as comments, with same timestamp) all from my own account (I'll update these last to give everyone time to take off the tin hats and review them):

http://sphinn.com/story/56374#69402

http://sphinn.com/story/86179#70836

http://sphinn.com/story/35796#68756

Thanks again for pointing out the issue. As Matt mentioned above, we're available anytime so please, if someone sees something like this again - feel free to address us directly. We're easily found on twitter as well - I'm @MichelleRobbins and I'm happy to address any issues Sphinn users encounter at the site.

Michelle

Thanks for looking into this.  It seemed too coincidental given the topic it was related to.  While it was important for us to speak up, my own reaction was definitely over the top though, which fits with my knee-jerk reality (a personal living hell thing).  And I sincerely apologize to Matt, you and the entire Sphinn team for such a harsh statement.

Michelle,

Aight, so that part was wrong :) That is an amazing coincidence. I'll update the post. Thank you for looking into it.

I do still stand by the rest of my post, however.

@mvandemar - Agreed it does look suspicious - and trust me, we were concerned as well. If that had been the only record I'd found with that timestamp - someone would've had some splainin to do. But unfortunately, 1500+ records all with the same problem so now I've got some extra work to do.  I am happy that it was discovered however, so that we can get the data corrected.

Phew! I figured it had to be something technical, as we (at Sphinn) were having crazy things happening during the migration. There was a good 2-3 week period where every story I submitted replaced the last story I submitted, but kept the same description and comments. It was very strange.So it doesn't surprise me that this new bug happened. It makes sense that it wasn't one anyone would noticed at the time, due to its nature.

I definitely couldn't imagine Danny, Michelle, Rob or Nick (who was working on the upgrade) secretly letting a mozzer post something to an old thread. But it did also defy logical explanation (as did some of the other crazy bugs that were happening).Great detective work, Michelle!

Damn it, Michelle...

Now what am I supposed to do with all these torches and pitchforks?

Oh don't worry @seomofo - this is the world of seo/sem/smm - those pitchforks and torches will come in handy again soon enough ;)