• Light/Dark
  • Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
  • We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.

Tesla customer is given admin access to official forums, deletes them

Adree

Adree

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,072
Wild story from this tweet


https://www.dansdeals.com/more/dans...te-forums-1-5-million-tesla-account-contacts/

So I called Tesla and asked the agent to please list me as an owner on the Tesla Forums. The agent had no idea what "forums" meant. I explained that they were on Tesla.com, but sure enough, there is no link on Tesla's site to the forums. I said to type in forums.tesla.com and the agent said she would pass on my request to her IT department.

For a company that is manufacturing the car of the future, the Tesla forums seem like they're stuck in the stone-age. There is no search functionality. There is no private messaging option. There is no way to upload images. There is no way to edit posts after they're made. There is no way to tell who is actually a Tesla owner and who is just browsing for info. There are no visible moderators or company support to address issues as there should be on such a valuable platform.

I checked back on the forums after an hour and noticed something was weird. Suddenly I had the ability to edit and delete everyone's posts! Then I looked at the top of the page and noticed the admin bar. Something very strange was going on here.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

What's really bad is that he wasn't the only person that was given access from what he could surmise and it was revealing personal info about forum members including Tesla employees. He also figured out Elon Musk hadn't visited in years.

He had made a thread about an issue that was deleted previously so he used admin powers to resurrect the thread but then unpublished it again which also unpublished every single post that was older than his thread reducing thousands of posts to dozens.

uvou947.gif
 
Kitsunelaine

Kitsunelaine

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,382
An amazing ammount of technical oversight for only the finest manufacturers in the industry.
 
bad poster

bad poster

Banned
Jan 6, 2018
428
but don't they know that electric luxury sedans are the only thing between us and total destruction?
 
liquidtmd

liquidtmd

Avenger
Oct 28, 2017
6,134
So I called Tesla and asked the agent to please list me as an owner on the Tesla Forums. The agent had no idea what "forums" meant. I explained that they were on Tesla.com, but sure enough, there is no link on Tesla's site to the forums. I said to type in forums.tesla.com and the agent said she would pass on my request to her IT department.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That's....that's honestly amazing.

* I.T dept, day

Bob: "HEY JIM, JIM LOOK HERE. WE GOT A REQUEST THROUGH FROM THE HELP DESK. SAYS WE GOTTA MAKE THIS GUY AN OWNER OF...WHATEVER THIS URL IS"

Jim: "WHO IS THE PERSON FROM HELPDESK"

Bob: 'DUNNO'

Jim: "WHAT'S THE DETAIL AND REASON FOR THE AUTHORIZATION"

Bob: "He owns one of our cars"

Jim: "OH SURE YEAH THATS COOL, AS LONG AS HELPDESK SAY IT'S OK"

I work for an IT department....never, ever take helpdesk at face value
 
Regulus Tera

Regulus Tera

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,458
You would think a company that bases its reputation on groundbreaking technological achievement would know something about social engineering.
 
Dyle

Dyle

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
29,944
Could someone tell the admins here I need to be listed as an owner.

Thanks
 
Theecliff

Theecliff

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,004
this is hilarious

love how the guy became folklore legend on the forums immediately after too
 
Heroin Cat

Heroin Cat

Member
Oct 27, 2017
673
New Zealand
Amazing. I can't believe that a 'delete all posts older than X' was so easily accessed, even if he was given admin rights.

I'm not surprised that Elon Musk hasn't visited the forums in months. Not enough time in his schedule to take acid, tweet AND visit his company's forums.
 
Akira86

Akira86

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,589
beautiful story. I laughed. I cried. I am back to the laughing phase.


just call up to customer service and be like "yeah just add me to the admin of your site, I'll check back later, kthx"

and they just add him.

i am literally incapable. i simply cannot.
 
Dingens

Dingens

Circumventing ban with an alt account
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
2,018
Makes you wonder about the wireless car updates... and how easy those might be to hack.
It's bound to happen sooner or later
 
zzz

zzz

Member
Oct 27, 2017
760
They didn't even intend to delete the forums.

Clearly this was going in a direction I hadn't anticipated, so I unpublished and then deleted the thread again. Except the flaming pile of garbage forum software decided to unpublish every thread that was older than my post. No normal forum software would do anything like that. The forums went from tens of thousands of threads to dozens of threads.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
7aged

7aged

Member
Oct 28, 2017
922
Dear ERA-helpdesk,

I'm a holder of a coveted gold membership, however I'm dismayed that other members are not able to acknowledge this exclusive status and how it owns.
Therefore I demand to be given "owner" status on the forum in recognition.
 
SteveMeister

SteveMeister

Member
Oct 31, 2017
1,821
Their forums have been terrible since the beginning, and never improved. It's very, very clear that minimal attention was ever given to them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.