How can someone be an admin and not be in the admin usergroup?

[Macsee]

An old account on my forums that hasn't been used for years, has returned but he can't seem to login so he emails me.

I do a search in the adminCP for an exact match on that username and I come up with two account identical in every way - same username, same email address, same everything. The only thing that's different is their IDs - the two IDs are separated by a few thousand numbers.

Strange. But it gets worse. When I click on user manager to see the profile, one account is in the Registered usergroup. Fair enough.

The other account's primary usergroup is Administrators.

Alarm bells immediately go off. I went and did a user search and asked for a listing of all users who have the primary usergroup of Adminstrators.

His user's name doesn't come up in the list.

I've tried the search several times. His profile is clear that he's an Administrator but when I list all admins, it's only my name that comes up.

How is this possible?

(I've checked config.php and it's only my user ID in there)

[kh99]

There was an issue a while back where it was possible to create an account with the same user name as an existing account (or one that at least looked like it), because some strange unprintable characters were allowed in the user name. I'm not sure of the details so I don't know if, by the time it got in to the database, it was exactly the same user name or just one that looks like it. Maybe check the registration ips on both and see if either looks suspicious.

But I don't know why, if he has a primary group of admin, that he wouldn't show up in a search.

Edit: what happens if you do a direct db query like

SELECT * FROM user WHERE usergroupid = 6

[Macsee]

Thanks, kh99. The registrations IPs and everything look exactly the same, as do all the other details like DOB, homepage etc., that the user filled in. Other indicators now point to this being a genuine user not up to any fishy business.

I regret I can't do the db query now as I've made some changes and deleted one of those accounts.

It may be pertinent to note that these two accounts were both created when the forum was running on phpBB and before it was imported into vB. That may have had some influence on the weird behaviour I noted in the OP.