Last night, I've earned a "honorary" title of IT Manager. I gave the "delete" permission to three other editors in their branches of the Developer Zone main site, and accidentally took away everybody else's "view" permissions in the same branches. Assuming it was just a simple change, I didn't take the trouble to recheck the site as an unprivileged user, and happily went to my hotel -- where the internet connection happened to be down. So when I returned online this morning, I had all reasons to be pissed off at myself.

There is truth in a favourite saying of one of my good friends -- "NEVER assume!"

P.S. There were three good things in this case too. First, there is no way to make the site lose your passwords -- for the simple reason they're not stored on this server. Second, I'm a bit smarter now, and we've even got a procedure in place for dealing with such problems should they reappear in future. And third (which is good and bad at the same time), nobody of the external developers appeared to notice this -- judging from the lack of comments and questions on the forums or DevZone wiki.

I am sure, however, that this third thing will go away as the popularity of the site goes up.