So... ZooVille's back!

[Zoointofoxes]

I'm really happy that Zooville is back! Only here can I be who I really am. I found a lot of like-minded people here, and countless tips. Thank you and keep up the good work. Of course I will try to contribute money.

 

[JustSomeZooGuy]

I don’t think it’s right that mine and others posts have been deleted. There is substantial evidence that this user is somehow involved with an animal abuse incident, and highly like that he’s one of four individuals connected to a zoosadism ring in southern Missouri.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out that it makes Zooville staff look bad - complicit even - by deleting these posts and covering it up.

Agreed fully. I have personal connections in that region and the couple people I know are all good people and dear friends of mine. The only bad one I’ve heard about thus far is the guy that was arrested and I was aware of him not being the best person as far back as a year ago and as such I never tried to become friends with him. This is the first I’m hearing of a potential zoosadism ring down there but it wouldn’t shock me if there are others out there.

 

[erphy]

Agreed fully. I have personal connections in that region and the couple people I know are all good people and dear friends of mine. The only bad one I’ve heard about thus far is the guy that was arrested and I was aware of him not being the best person as far back as a year ago and as such I never tried to become friends with him. This is the first I’m hearing of a potential zoosadism ring down there but it wouldn’t shock me if there are others out there.

I doubt we will ever know the full truth if there's a connection to that situation and ZV owners/operators whoever they are. My whole issue is that it is super suss how the owner/operator had their digital devices confiscated and searched by LE simultaneously while ZV was taken offline due to what we were told was a "hardware issue".

Now it is magically back and we are supposed to not think too deeply about all that. I never trust anything especially a zoo site, but now I'm super suss mode.

 

[JustSomeZooGuy]

I doubt we will ever know the full truth if there's a connection to that situation and ZV owners/operators whoever they are. My whole issue is that it is super suss how the owner/operator had their digital devices confiscated and searched by LE simultaneously while ZV was taken offline due to what we were told was a "hardware issue".

Now it is magically back and we are supposed to not think too deeply about all that. I never trust anything especially a zoo site, but now I'm super suss mode.

Believe me I’m highly suspicious too. Everything I’ve heard from on here and the people I know just has too many coincidences for it all to be completely unrelated. I mean shit, the court case documents for the Missouri guy specifically mention approx. 60 media storage devices were seized along with 3-4 other people being present at the time of the raid and Zooville went down less than 24hrs after this.

 

[ikanon]

I doubt we will ever know the full truth if there's a connection to that situation and ZV owners/operators whoever they are. My whole issue is that it is super suss how the owner/operator had their digital devices confiscated and searched by LE simultaneously while ZV was taken offline due to what we were told was a "hardware issue".

Now it is magically back and we are supposed to not think too deeply about all that. I never trust anything especially a zoo site, but now I'm super suss mode.

From what Floofy stated on ZC during the downtime, there were two serves, and two server operators. ZV on its own server with its own server admin. ZCA, ZooWG and the Wiki shared the other sever and admin, that may be the recent subject of LE. So ZV should be "clean" if that is true, which sounds reasonable, as the ZV server admin was able to set up a down notice at a time where he should not have been able to do so if he was in legal trouble.

 

[aceral1914]

Thanks staff for all the effort in bringing the site back, and your normal work that you all do in here... It's appreciated

 

[erphy]

From what Floofy stated on ZC during the downtime, there were two serves, and two server operators. ZV on its own server with its own server admin. ZCA, ZooWG and the Wiki shared the other sever and admin, that may be the recent subject of LE. So ZV should be "clean" if that is true, which sounds reasonable, as the ZV server admin was able to set up a down notice at a time where he should not have been able to do so if he was in legal trouble.

Why did they all go down simultaneously. And initially ZV didn't have an error message it was just a black hole on the internet throwing errors like the site was disabled.

Its all guessing, but it is also possible the separate ZV owner/admin took it down as a precaution and found a new home for it using backups to rebuild it. Fact of the matter is we'll never know the full truth.

 

[wolfman1917]

My question is if dogluver had devices and whatnot seized by LE, was zoo stuff discovered on them, and if so it is highly suspect that they'd make a deal with him to give up the goods on this site for the purposes of taking it over as a LE honeypot. I'm not making accusations as to that is what happened, but it is impossible to not think that could be a potential scenario when LE gets involved with seizing the site controller/owner's digital devices.

It is very suspect that a hosting company would wipe a site's data after only a few weeks of non-payment. Usually payment cycles are a minimum of 30 days for example, and they don't just wipe everything giving a grace period. Sure storage is expensive, but not insane for a few hundred TB of a forum. Also significant sites are not typically on net 30 billing, it would be for many months , even a year. I suppose paying everything in crypto etc could complicate things so there is that.

I want to believe that dogluver was falsely accused, and LE dug through his devices and he had everything properly encrypted without LE ever getting access to ZV. It's just a far stretch for me, as once LE has their claws into you, even hiding passwords and such can jam you up in legalities, making the easier path to "make a deal".

I want to second this concern. I'm glad the site's back up, but let's be real: LE is not friendly to zoo. This site has always taken a hard stance against CP, but it would be foolish to think that would earn even an iota of goodwill from the police.

I've read through the thread a couple times and still don't fully understand the timeline, what accusations were made, when/what was seized, who was arrested, etc. But what I gather from this thread so far is that 1) Dogluver was falsely accused and arrested, 2) the police seized hard drives from him, 3) the site went down, and then back up a couple weeks later. Beyond that, the specifics are still pretty murky for me.

But regardless of the specifics, one has to wonder if there wasn't some attempt to make this site a honeypot. If the admin for a major zoo site gets arrested—regardless of whether or not those charges are false, and regardless of whether or not the charges actually relate to zoo—LE has a million different ways of putting pressure on people, and I'm sure there are a few cops who would salivate at the prospect of having 1000's of zoos communicate and coordinate through a server that they control, or otherwise have some privileged vision into. I don't think it's paranoid to be on edge.

But all that said... What can we really do about it? Just being zoo is kinda legally gray as it is, and yet we all still choose to participate here. Practically speaking, I don't really see much any of us can do here other than be extra careful about how we use the forum. (Though I would really appreciate hearing from Dogluver on all this... Hearing exactly what went down, firsthand, might set some minds at ease...) I'm kinda scared, but I'm not going anywhere.

And again, glad it's back up.

 

[erphy]

I want to second this concern. I'm glad the site's back up, but let's be real: LE is not friendly to zoo. This site has always taken a hard stance against CP, but it would be foolish to think that would earn even an iota of goodwill from the police.

I've read through the thread a couple times and still don't fully understand the timeline, what accusations were made, when/what was seized, who was arrested, etc. But what I gather from this thread so far is that 1) Dogluver was falsely accused and arrested, 2) the police seized hard drives from him, 3) the site went down, and then back up a couple weeks later. Beyond that, the specifics are still pretty murky for me.

But regardless of the specifics, one has to wonder if there wasn't some attempt to make this site a honeypot. If the admin for a major zoo site gets arrested—regardless of whether or not those charges are false, and regardless of whether or not the charges actually relate to zoo—LE has a million different ways of putting pressure on people, and I'm sure there are a few cops who would salivate at the prospect of having 1000's of zoos communicate and coordinate through a server that they control, or otherwise have some privileged vision into. I don't think it's paranoid to be on edge.

But all that said... What can we really do about it? Just being zoo is kinda legally gray as it is, and yet we all still choose to participate here. Practically speaking, I don't really see much any of us can do here other than be extra careful about how we use the forum. (Though I would really appreciate hearing from Dogluver on all this... Hearing exactly what went down, firsthand, might set some minds at ease...) I'm kinda scared, but I'm not going anywhere.

And again, glad it's back up.

Agreed, I'm paranoid by nature and as I stated in other posts that I don't trust anything. Ultimately unless you are posting content that you admit you made and can be traced to you, words are just words without any evidence to back up any sort of text post absent those that can lead to incriminating activity. Examples would be arranging for meetups by a poster posing to offer their animal for activities. You show up to such an agreed meetup after explaining what you want, why you are going to meet, you show up and they have all the evidence they need.

I can't imagine how many men wanting to "find owners for cookie" would fall for such things.

I'll continue using the forum, but upped my opsec 10X from here out. I already assume every post here is read by some form of anti-zoo and/or LE entity.

 

[ikanon]

But regardless of the specifics, one has to wonder if there wasn't some attempt to make this site a honeypot. If the admin for a major zoo site gets arrested—regardless of whether or not those charges are false, and regardless of whether or not the charges actually relate to zoo—LE has a million different ways of putting pressure on people, and I'm sure there are a few cops who would salivate at the prospect of having 1000's of zoos communicate and coordinate through a server that they control, or otherwise have some privileged vision into. I don't think it's paranoid to be on edge.

Some years ago, there was an incident where LE reestablished a taken down CP site and ran it for a few days only. They got some good catch, but had to take a lot of heat for it. Those higher up in the system were not happy about it. I doubt they will do that again unless they expect some really promising catch. With Fausty long time out of the game, there no longer seems to be any real big fish in he pond. And Fausty was usually caught in the field, not in the net.

 

[Zetereft]

It's good to see the site back. I thought the downtime was somehow related to Motherless going down too, but it's good to know it wasn't.

 

[Muten7]

Hi guys, thanks you are back, great work.
anyone else got some weird things when trying to connect to the address one or two days ago ?
When i tried to connect ot the address it was asking me to download something so i refused, it looked suspicious.
is there was some info on beast chat about the server? as i dont use telegram i had no info about how was going the server

 

[wolfman1917]

Hi guys, thanks you are back, great work.
anyone else got some weird things when trying to connect to the address one or two days ago ?
When i tried to connect ot the address it was asking me to download something so i refused, it looked suspicious.
is there was some info on beast chat about the server? as i dont use telegram i had no info about how was going the server

Yeah I saw that too, but I wouldn't be concerned about it. I'm a software dev with over a decade of experience and I inspected that file out of curiousity, and I am very confident that it wasn't malicious. It looked more like a technical hiccup from when they were trying to cold start the site. All the file did was to bootstrap the forum by trying to load some app files. Even if you downloaded that file and tried to run it locally, it would just crash without doing anything.

There was nothing interesting, sensitive, nor malicious in that file.

(For any admins reading this, it was probably app.php/main.php/index.php, depending on your setup/framework. php isn't my specialty, so I don't know php file naming conventions. But yeah, if you weren't aware, there was a brief window when we could download some code, though it all looked pretty boilerplate.)

 

[pes]

Why did they all go down simultaneously. And initially ZV didn't have an error message it was just a black hole on the internet throwing errors like the site was disabled.

Its all guessing, but it is also possible the separate ZV owner/admin took it down as a precaution and found a new home for it using backups to rebuild it. Fact of the matter is we'll never know the full truth.

ZV, ZCA, zoowg and the wiki all shared the same servers and admin. But ZV also has a secondary original admin unrelated to ZCA.

(For any admins reading this, it was probably app.php/main.php/index.php, depending on your setup/framework. php isn't my specialty, so I don't know php file naming conventions. But yeah, if you weren't aware, there was a brief window when we could download some code, though it all looked pretty boilerplate.)

The octet streams the sever would offer for download should not be a problem anymore. The sever was misconfigured and the admin says it is fixed now.