Goodbye, Huntington Bank!

A few weeks ago, I thought I'd give Huntington Bank a go, so I opened an account and started the process of moving my direct deposit over and all that fun stuff. Yesterday, I get a voicemail from their fraud prevention department; they saw someone log in using tor and froze everything. I call them, verify myself satisfactorily, and am asked if I use tor. A) How is that your business, and B) see A. But I say yes, I use tor, but not for all traffic. After some back and forth bickering, and an attempted lecture of the dangers of using tor (tor is no more dangerous than the open internet, morons), they request I go to a local branch to have them set up a new username/password for me. I do so, the local branch calls the fraud prevention folks, and they refuse to release my account until their security department reviews it. WTF?! So *I* call them back, from the bank branch, and they will release the funds if I'm closing my account, but not if I just need access to them. Double WFT?!?! You'll give me my money if I close my account, but not access to my account, or my money, if I want to keep it open?!?! In what world does that make ANY sense?! So, of course I'm going to close my account. I mean, someone managed to breach it within weeks of being opened, even though I use best practices? Sorry. Not sure I want to bank with you? Then refuse to give me access to my own account because I admitted to using tor?! Even though I don't use it for online banking?! (as a matter of fact, I use it to hide my whereabouts when playing Alternate Reality Games, not that it's anyone's business WHY I use tor.)

So, the person at the branch is helpless to do anything, so starts the process of closing my account. Except my funds are frozen, and she has no idea how to deal with it. So I have to hand MY cellphone to the lady and let the morons at fraud prevention walk her through. During the process, they apparently ask for some sort of security credentials... which she tells them WHILE WITHIN EARSHOT OF ME. So, she's incompetent at closing my account AND at security best practices (hell, I could have dialed a friend and had them claim to be in fraud prevention, and social engineered access to my account, for all she knew... or at least, to her credentials.. which I would now know if I were less than honest and had made an attempt at remembering... Oh... Did I mention she typed her PC login/password while her keyboard was within plain sight of me, too... So I could have that, too, if I wanted...) So, I did what any tech savvy disgruntled customer does... I start tweeting the experience while I'm waiting the 30 minutes AFTER my funds have been given to me for her to be walked through closing my account... At which point, she got extremely paranoid... Are you recording me? No, I'm posting to the internet. Not my number?! That's a federal thing... No, not your number, which anyone in line could have heard and memorized as well...

The TL;DR of it is, thanks, Huntington Bank, for being a bunch of morons and losing me as a customer. It's your own fault. Your tellers need to learn security best practices. Your fraud prevention needs to learn a little about tor and quit attempting to spread FUD about it. And your security department should be a 24/7 operation; you're a bank, for %deity%'s sake! Thank %deity% I wasn't on vacation outside Huntington's footprint, because I'd be stuck there.

Upcoming downtime

I'm considering doing the proposed re-install maybe around new-years, or the following weekend. I'll post a maintenance banner in the site's place when I do, but that will likely be the earliest.

Content

When I do the upcoming blog redesign, the content will temporarily go away as well, as I plan on re-organize some of it into separate blogs with new URL's (for instance, Abuse of Authority and Ghosts of Ohio). LGPedia will also be unavailable during this time as well.

My game plan is as follows:

• Back up the current LGpedia database and file structure.
  


• Back up the current blog database.
  


• Export the blog posts.
  


• Note the installed Wordpress plugins.
  


• Back up the installed Wordpress themes.
  


• Save any custom php code.
  


• Wipe the entire site.
  


• Remove LGpedia's DNS entries and sub-folder.
  


• Install Wordpress and enable multi-site.
  


• Set up LGpedia in Wordpress multi-site.
  


• Restore LGpedia database.
  


• Upload LGpedia files.
  


• Install WPMW (or similar).
  


• Re-upload Wordpress themes.
  


• Set up additional blogs.
  


• Import specific content to additional blogs.
  


• Import the remainder to main blog.
  


• Restore any custom php code.
  


• Set up previous plugins.
  


• Add social-networking plugins.
  


• Open up multi-site for user-created blogs.
  

Some notes regarding LGpedia:

• I am planning on setting up a "blog" for for any news specific to LGpedia.
  


• I am removing the DNS entry for it, as the wildcard DNS required by Wordpress multi-site will handle it.
  


• Editing will be enabled, and controlled via Wordpress login.
  

It will probably be a couple of weeks before I pull the trigger, and can hopefully accomplish everything in one night.

Pi to 10,000 digits

[youtube http://youtu.be/nZXPJyjUINc&w=450]

QOTD

Let's not just make noise, let's make a difference.

Removed forums, chat and wiki

I've just started the site redesign, and my first steps have been to remove forums, chat, and the non-LGPedia wiki. It looks like the way things are configured, the Wiki showed up under ever single site, anyhow. Will look at integrating LGPedia into the rest of the site at some point in the future. For now, I'm trying to separate content without breaking things too badly. Since I have used Categories wisely, at least in specific use-cases, this may be simply a matter of exporting specific categories and then importing the results in a new site on the network. I may have to clean up some links afterwards, but that should be simply enough :)

Site redesign coming (again)

I may have mentioned this previously, but I have decided to do another site redesign. This time around, I'll be keeping all current content, but using the multi-site capabilities of Wordpress to break some items off to their own sub-domain. I also plan on dropping phpBB (and possibly enabling some WP-specific forum plugin, if forums are needed at all), and making LGpedia a more permanent part of the site (but still at its current URL), since it is becoming painfully obvious that the official one is unlikely to ever come back. This will likely involve a re-install of everything, just to clean things up a bit. Hopefully, this will also fix the reported speed issues that only appear to intermittently impact LGpedia.

Some ideas:

• LGpedia will get a Wordpress blog page for any news or updates, though the wiki will remain exactly where it's at. I'll likely unite the logins between the LGpedia blog and the actual wiki, or investigate converting the content to one of the many WP-Wiki plugins (this is less likely, as that would likely cause major speed issues)




• Remove chat, as I don't believe it's used at all.




• Ghosts of Ohio will become its own site, as will Abuse of Authority.



• Additional subdomains for additional topics that I write at least simi-regularly on



• The main blog will likely move to blog. instead of www. and www. will be more of a front page to all the sites. Speaking of which,



• I may open up subdomains for user registration, as long as they follow certain guidelines.

Any other suggestions?