Employee left and took all info for WordPress blog with him
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At one point in time, the company I work for had an employee working on keeping our blog updated. He was fired 2 years ago, and when he left, he took his usernames and passwords for all of our social media accounts with him. As the new social media manager here, I am looking for a way to re-gain access to the old accounts instead of just having to make new ones.
The link to the account is here: http://hqpt.wordpress.com/
Can someone help me gain access to this blog or at least deactivate it? I have scoured the support topics for an answer, but I can’t seem to find one.
Thanks in advance!
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If you can get a dump of the mySQL database you should be able to see what the admin logins are
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Pay no attention to kettlebottom – you don’t have access to the mySQL database here.
The long and short is that the company blog is owned by the account of the person who set it up and was then fired – WordPress.COM will not hand over someones blog to a stranger – your best bet is to make nice with the person that was fired and get the credentials from them and have them transfer the blog to a company email account –
I will flag this for staff attention but they will tell you the same thing
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Thank you for the advice. I have a very limited knowledge of mySQL, and have been looking over the info in wordpress support since I saw your post.
Would we have had to previously backed up the blog to cPanel or Plesk to get the dump of the MySQL database? How does this work exactly?
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PS – you could start a new blog with a new name or map a custom domain name to it – at some point in the future the old fired guys site would drop back in the search results
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Ok, thank you for your help.
Apparently he is a bit of a disgruntled employee. The owners have been trying to get the passwords from him for over 2 years, but he “can’t remember any of them.” So basically, we don’t have access to twitter or wordpress, AND we’ve had to create a new Facebook page.
But thank you for your help!
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Your old blog here is mapped to his email so the “can’t remember the password” is Bull S*^$ because there is a lost password function on all blogs here so the password can be reset for this blog and all the other accounts –
Lost and forgotten passwords happen all the time so as long as the mapped email is still active the log-in can be retrieved
Many places sort of forget the passwords when they fire an employee – maybe have your lawyer jog his memory
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He “can’t remember what e-mail he used” to set up the blog. I don’t think anyone around here thinks the blog is worth it to get a lawyer involved, but there’s over five years of material on the blog that I think makes our blog much more valuable than simply scrapping it and starting a new one.
I’ll figure it out though! Thank you for all your help.
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Most companies have some sort of retained counsel – so count the Posts and Pages – multiply times the time to recreate each Post or Page (maybe 2 or 3 hours) times your loaded billing rate (nobody is less than $ 75- per hour today) – do the math and have legal have a chat with him about recovering the costs to recreate the information – yes you can copy each Post and Page by hand but that still takes a lot of time –
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It looks like you have comments turned off on the blog so you can’t post a comment (that goes to the email of the account)
But you also have a regular web site it looks like – so get a new blog here and map it as a sub-domain of your regular site blog.your-site.com – much better search engine stuff and looks more professional (don’t forget the no ads upgrade)
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Who actually opened/initiated the WP account?
If the employee opened it, he is the owner of it in WP’s eyes and they won’t help you get control.
If someone else in the company opened it and gave him access to maintain it, that’s a different situation.
Under WP policy, the person who opens the account is the owner unless they agree to transfer it to someone else.
There is another thread very similar to this in which a Staff member explained all this. Not sure if I can find it now or not.
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Blogs at WordPress.com are the property of the users who register them, unless ownership is transferred to another user: http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#transferring-your-blog-to-another-user-or-account
If the owner has lost access to his WordPress.com account, he can regain access by visiting https://en.wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword and clicking “Need More Help?” if necessary.
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