Grant Steinfeld
Grant Steinfeld, a.k.a. Bukanator was an early participant in Lonelygirl15. He was hired to shoot still photography of the project and was involved with the creation of lonelygirl15.com.
Steinfeld is a San Fransisco area software engineer who originally played the role of Bukanator.
Bukanator
Bukanator was an early fan on YouTube who started LonelyGirl's first fan site, lonelygirl15.com.
He was supposed to appear like a regular fan, however when it was discovered this "fan site" was actually created a month before Bree started her vlogs Bukanator quickly found himself at the eye of a storm of suspicion. To cover his tracks, Bukanator claimed that Daniel had actually registered the website as a joke (reasons for this have been given as either because Daniel told Bree if she ever started blogging he bet she'd become famous and would need a fan site, or that Daniel registered the site because Bree bragged if she were to ever upload vblogs to youtube she'd become famous). While Daniel had registered lonelygirl15.com, but had no plan of using it, so the story went that Bukanator e-mailed him asking permission to make a fan site and Daniel handed the already registered one over to Bukanator.
Bukanator claimed to be a Web designer with an interest in photography. Under his watch, lonelygirl15.com remained almost completely stagnant. He would upload the videos, but with virtually no promotion of the site or its forum (which were silent) almost no one ever went to it. Finally a few core fans began talking at the forums and eventually a community was built up there, though none of this had anything to do with actions on Bukanator's part. In fact he was widely criticized by the fans at the forum for being a poor moderator. They made many pleas for improvements to the site and especially the forum, and despite the occassional promise he'd do something about it Bukanator never actually did anything. Frustration with his site eventually led a group of fans to create and move to an alternate fan site, The Children of Anchor Cove, and virtually all forum members joined it, leaving the official forum near silent once again.
Bukanator continued to operate the board well after Steinfeld's exit from the project, sometime in July 2006. It is unknown who was moderating at the board in his absence under the name, and it's hard to know which moderator shortcomings were Steinfeld's.
Dismissal from the project
In July 2006, Steinfeld was shut out of the project. He went to Candace Murphy, a reporter with Inside Bay Area, and told her that Lonelygirl15 was a production and encouraged her to hack into the Lonelygirl15 e-mail accounts to learn the identity of the creators.
He later told a different version of the story to Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times. Steinfeld claimed that he grew tired of running the site and dropped out of the project after fans discovered that the site had been registered before the first Lonelygirl15 video was posted on YouTube.
Some of Steinfeld's photography of Jessica Lee Rose was published in the New York Times and were briefly available on Steinfeld's personal web site.
