I agree with you and marto. Most likely (imho), tye approved his own post by using divine powers to do it through paco's account.
I did some digging using my own godly powers, and have assembled the following timeline:
- 1999-10-26: paco created his account, and posted his sole writeup.
- 2000-05-25: he uploaded a package from Everything Development. See Hint Information. (It was never used here.)
- 2000-08-28: he seems to have made an appearance.
- 2002-06-11: seems to have approved and frontpaged that post by tye
- 2002-06-11: levelchange - directly from 1 to 5! which is not normally possible.
- 2002-07-02: homenode.lastedit
- 2004-01-23: homenode.lastupdate
- 2004-06-02: scratchpad created
- 2005-08-15: homenode.nodeupdated
I suspect that tye was being more ironic than nefarious, given that his post was specifically about this:
the ability to approve or front-page your own nodes has been taken away
He had taken away the ability to FP his own node, so wore paco as a sock-puppet to do that deed;
and had to jack up paco's level in order to do so easily. :-)
I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16 ,000 zombies.
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> See Hint Information. (It was never used here.)
I "don't have access to Hint Information." :)
But if he uploaded a package he's not a simple user.
So he's either an alternate personality of a god-like monk, or a god-like monk took over his account.
Can you tell when his profile's pic was updated?
BTW: Fictitious joke personalities are not uncommon, German parliament has one on the website, Czechs enjoy a mythical super genius.
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I have updated my node above with additional data extracted from his homenode. It should be kept in mind that pretty much any of those could have been done by a god, even if paco was a "real" user. For example, if my hypothesis above is correct, tye was responsible for paco's level change on 2000-06-11, allowing paco to approve/fp tye's post, and then did that whilst wearing paco as a sockpuppet — because, in order to moderate, one must be at least a Friar, which at that time required a mininum XP of 500. The database shows that paco's level changed directly from 1 to 5 on that date — a feat which is best described as supernatural. As I've said, all of those fields can be manipulated in the database by a god.
Sorry about Hint Information. There's really nothing interesting about it. It was a feature package which appears to have been developed over at EveryDevel and uploaded here, but never integrated/enabled. In fact, I don't even know for sure that the package was developed at EveryDevel; only that it was in the Everything package format. It could have originated on another system. It's very possible, perhaps even likely, that someone could have downloaded and installed the Everything engine and done their own development.
Also, we must remember that in those early days the user restrictions and compartmentalizations weren't what they are now. It's very possible that an "ordinary" user could have uploaded a package. I see no (hard) evidence that paco was anything other than an ordinary user, i.e. no evidence that he was ever a member of gods/developers/pmdev, etc. But no evidence that he couldn't have been, either.
Your hypothesis that he was a pupsocket (of, for example, vroom) is a very real possibility.
It would certainly be consistent with the pattern of single-use / test accounts created by vroom, nate, etc. in the early days.
In any case, I see no (hard) evidence one way or the other.
I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16 ,000 zombies.
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