(Also posted in Estee's Trope thread.)

This is for Estee, Snidget, and anyone in a similar predicament. And for whom the hack can't be corrected soon enough, although I'm sure everything possible is being done to fix this.

If you are locked out of this forum, and know what your screen ID was, and still have the Email address you originally used to register oh so long ago, you can recover. At least this worked for me and (I believe) adrichcharlie.

Go to the RTVW login page.

Click the Register a New Account option

Register using your old ID screen name (keep letter case as it was originally) and your old Email address.

The system will send to the address that you just gave them a new Password. You can use it to log in with your old familiar screen name, you will have your post odometer, and access to your emails.

And you're good to go. All that has changed is that you have to use the new PW.

If you previously re-registered using a different Screen ID (such as the "Agman2" that Agman used) and your old address, the trick will be to disassociate that new name with that old address.

I suggest (I haven't had to test this, so there may be a snag that I haven't anticipated) signing in with your new screen ID, going to your new account and changing your Email address to a temporory address, maybe a yahoo account or an address from the site that Spot suggested), then sign out.

Then you could use the above method to reregister using your original Screen name and email address, and it should work since that address is no longer associated with your newer Screen ID.

As Spot says, it seems that the hacker deactivated a lot of accounts (others were apparently unaffected), and when you sign in with a new ID and your normal Email address, the system thinks you are a new poster.

I'm guessing that the hacker got in as a system administrator, started inactivating posters one by one (possibly in alphabetic order), and just got tired of doing that after a while and quit. The list of RTVW posters is really really long. This could explain why the unaffected accounts are farther down the alpha list, like Mooney, Puffy and Pepe.

Does not explain Snidget. Obviously, for her, it was personal.