CWPST17

CWPST17 (thought to stand for Client, WindowsPlayer, and Studio 2017) was a roblox user with anomalous properties. The join date changed, but it was most commonly: It was first detected in November 2012, on Welcome to the Town of Robloxia, a popular game in 2012. This also happens to be around the time the first Social Avatar Network Script (SANS) websites appeared. The User ID is always the same, 17.
 * December 12, 2003
 * June 17, 2006
 * November 5, 2010
 * April 17, 2012
 * The current date (that it's online on)

It's activity seems to be based on the activity of SANS and UGC non-Roblox sites, and smaller activity spikes on old Roblox revivals. It has had massive spikes of activity when these particular sites appeared:

BLOX City (January 2016 start of development, March 2016 launch, July 2017 website reset, August 2017 rebranding)

Social-Paradise (2012-2013)

TerraBrix (UGC website) (2017)

Travoid/Klotarium (Based on SANS 2.0 but then rewritten to be non-SANS based) (2016? to 2017)

Graphictoria (old roblox revival, gt1 and gt2 2016, gt3 some time before june 2017, gt4)

Effects and history
The effects have got stranger with time. The account created itself sometime between June 7th, 2012 (SocialParadise launch) and November 2012 (first known appearance).

There was only one documented appearance in 2012. Apparently, it joined a random Town of Robloxia server and started spamming "e-e-e-e-e" in the chat. It also apparently rejoined the game automatically when kicked. The account was banned immediately by Roblox administrators.

It was quiet until January 2016 when Isaac Hymer started developing BLOX City, later to reach 120,000 accounts. The account unbanned itself on the day BLOX City started development, which is still unknown as Isaac has not told anyone. It was likened to a spambot initally, as it joined random games and started spamming "e-e-e-e-e" or "f-f-f-f-f" in the chat. By January 24th, however, the spambot attacks were notable enough to have their own website, "CWPST17 Attacks - Documented". On January 27th the account was banned again but unbanned itself within hours.

Attacks quieted down somewhat until March 6, 2016 when BLOX City launched. CWPST17 started kicking users from games, sometimes banning users from games they had never even played. It would change admin permissions so admins were lowly users or could only use non-abusive commands on themselves. It would set random countdowns until July 16, 2017 or September 6, 2017. By mid March it was shutting down servers altogether. Roblox admins made a ban-bot to ban the account on March 21st. This worked for around eight months.

Fast forward to November 18, 2016. CWPST17 joined ROBLOX High School and started kicking and banning users, setting messages with random characters, and even apparently giving some users temporary bans. Again Roblox admins made a ban-bot and it stopped, for about another eight months.

BLOX City had shut down, reopened, and was currently in the phase of reopening a new website. July 16, 2017, 3 AM CST. CWPST17 kicked things into seriously high gear. It unbanned itself at 3:37 am and started taking it's powers into high gear. It started with the same things as before, but then around four hours later, things got scary. It started modifying the website itself. Tickets were re-added, removed, and then re-added.

Features that were removed in 2011-12 were reappearing. Website themes. User Contests. BC prices were made arbitrarily cheaper or more expensive. Random parts of the website were reverting to looks from anywhere from 2007 to 2015 and then were reverted seconds later. Games were deleted. Deleted games were restored. Games were randomly made uncopylocked. Users accounts were wiped. 500,000 of them in fact.

While all of this was going on, it also had power over Roblox internal domains. Roblox clients were randomly updating to older versions. However, the strangest things hadn't happened yet.

Users in-game were having features of the Roblox client and studio disappearing or appearing. People's clients were being replaced with versions dating back as far back as early 2004 with early prototypes of Roblox.

After 12 hours of absolute madness, 1.1 million concurrent players were kicked from games. Games were replaced with a "ROBLOX Game servers are currently under maintenance." messages.

Then, the site went down.

Three hours later, the site was back up.

People were trying to log on to their accounts to find they didn't exist anymore. The whole site, client, and studio had been reverted to a primal state: June 5, 2006 12:02PM EST. Anything that was created before that time had been lost. All the backups were gone.

Minutes after Roblox released multiplayer for the first time.

CWPST17 was never seen again.

Theories
Roblox had to shut down a few days after this incident happened, but some fans took it over and started developing the site from it's primal 2006 stage after Roblox released the source code for the site and client before they shut down. It was in the public domain anyway - any copyrights were lost.

There are many theories as to what happened that day.

The number one theory is hackers, bots, or even a sentient being controlling Roblox. But the most plausible theory is user revolt. It's known that the 2012 to November 2016 incidents were bots and exploiters, but the July 2017 final incident in which the site was reverted remains a mystery.

Roblox was having a lot of bad updates at the time and a group of around 500 Roblox elite developers, 2006ers to 2010ers, and even some Roblox admins were angry.

It's thought that they somehow broke into Roblox's servers and started doing things. A lot of them were programmers - they would know how to revert parts of the site. They probably also had bots on their side. As for the revert and loss of backups, Roblox had no control over their server after 3 hours of the incident and they were powerless. Roblox kept a backup of every client version and every major site update since mid-2004. It's believed these developers thought that multiplayer was a good thing to keep, so they reverted to a backup made after the release of ROBLOX v0.3.030 - the update that added multiplayer to Roblox, on June 5, 2006. The backup was made five minutes after David Baszucki posted the release notes for v0.3.030 - he probably did a backup right after releasing the update.

All other backups were either deleted or moved to a unknown location - all rbxcdn.com domains went down 17 minutes after the site reverted to v0.3.030, so it's unknown where they are. Users found evidence of them being at http://roblox.com/Client/Backups/ /, but there was a 403 page and they don't know where the actual files are stored.

Roblox shut down on August 2, 2017, and the website, client, and studio source code for v0.3.030 was given to a group of fans that continued working on the site.

Addendum 1: The fans that are working on Roblox now have reported thati active users dropped 99.955% to 25,500 from roughly 56 million within 1 day of the site being taken control of by them.

Addendum 2: The active user count of Roblox apparently bottomed out at "around 2,400 to 2,600" by August 6th.

'''Addendum 3: The first client updates have been released, fixing bugs in the Roblox physics engine. [August 18, 2017]. The amount of active users is also slowly increasing, "going up by 1% or so." since August 6th.'''

'''Addendum 4: The first site updates have been released, adding some forum features. Progress is going well on some "major client updates." [August 23, 2017]'''

'''Addendum 5: Just a funny thing here. An "I survived 7/29/17" game has surfaced, made by the user "Survivor", who identifies as a 2007er. '''

Addendum 6: A new Scripting API (user jump speed) has been released, and these new features have been announced!

"1. A new blog (coming mid to late September

"2. DHTML (it was a feature back in 07)

"3. Studs will be able to be made smooth very soon!"

Addendum 7: [August 29, 2017] - Smooth Block Models have been released, as well as fixing Transparency.