This is a beautiful end to the LotR Mithril wank - come, read, appreciate the wankery!

Way back in the beginning of September, a wank was posted by ebbrowning about those brave Mithril Award critics who had their LJs cruelly hacked. Or so they said.

Entertaining wankery ensued, all now deleted (hmmm?) from F_W. (For the curious though, here's the first and the second half of a cached page.)

But there are interesting twists to the story.

The sum and substance of the piteous tale was that our brave heroes posted material that made fun of the MAs. Their sad claim: that the MAs or HASA had harvested IP addresses and somehow used these to hack into the LJs involved. Both Lindorien and Agent Tweed loudly trumpeted the alleged hack job on their journals. Many in the fandom were understandably concerned, and expressed sympathy and outrage.

There were sinister intimations from Lindorien, freely spread, that she knew the culprits to be admins or "members close to admins" at the MAs or HASA. Why these unnamed horrible criminals from HASA would delete material critical of the MAs as opposed to material critical of HASA was never explained.

The next claim was that Misarray, who had recently friended Lindorien, had also been hacked.

Funny thing about this.

Misarray lost comments that were 6 months old, unrelated to the Mithril Awards, and in Dutch. Misarray says she doesn't even know what HASA is. That makes it kind of hard to steal her HASA password; one would think?

Agent Tweed later said she was informed "as the hack was happening and managed to protect her LJ. (Oh? How clever of you! Please share the method used!) So next the admission that NOTHING was actually missing from Agent Tweed's LJ.

Many posters at F_W and other LJs pointed out the obvious - LJ occasionally eats comments, or groups of comments, and several completely unrelated LJs have had this happen recently (not to mention the "memories" meltdown.) There is a mundane explanation; no sinister evil-doer is necessary. Of course, it's much more dramatic to have "enemies" who consider your comments so important that they must be wiped out.

LJ tech support has a few words about these accusations, too. Agent Tweed posted that LJ abuse replied that"everything appeared perfectly legitimate on the servers."What a surprise!

But the best of all, Kiddies! At least two of those criminally "deleted" posts supposedly obliterated by the Mithril Masterminds of Evil? The links don't lead to an "entry not found" but to "You are not authorized to view this protected entry." (and don't worry if it suddenly disappears - I've got a screencap).

Oh the evil of it! A dastardly hacker broke in and set entries to private without the LJ owner realizing it! Brilliant!

Poor Lindorien. Don't worry, LJ tells you how to make them public again. Go here to read about it.

No surprise that many of these entries have now been set to private, or deleted. And that the original F_W thread has disappeared, as has a discussion/accusation thread started by Lindorien on the MA LJ. In fact, the LJ owner herself seems to have disappeared just like her comments.

What a beautiful wank!