Here: vBulletin.org Forum

as you can see, i give no details…

3 days ago, i had a chat with Robert, because he was stressed out about the guys at vbTeam who are stealing his stuff… he also think that i am involved in the GYSN stuff, so here is what i posted him:

******************

first, i’m not involved in vbteam at all… actually i’m doing the opposite. each time someone release a tool from one of my friends, i contact these friends and report the hacker, and most of the time, the problematic purchaser is tracked… have been done for vbSEO and Gio’s stuff last week. i hate releasers, but i had to find a solution, so instead of tracking the guys who are at level one, the real hackers who crack the systems, i decided to make a deal with them…

that deal is simple. i talked with the guys of GYSN and vbTeam, and made sure that they would not crack my official releases, but instead would spread the special version i give to them, nulled by me. that way, the kids who use the nulled versions have the official version, and the crackers have nothing to trace… they don’t know how to crack the official version because they don’t have to… and they do not have to use a false credit card to purchase any version, because they have them… i’m not fooled with bad credit cards either, so i don’t loose a penny.

the reason why i do that?

1- i don’t loose money from crackers who use false credit cards on my paypal, so my reputation on paypal is clean

2- no cracker is interested to look at my challenging licensing code, so my work is safe for a longer period

3- there is not enough nulled-users to be stressed about. for the possible 5000 clients for a script, about 100 are using a nulled forum. they will fade anyway, or purchase an official version as they will require support because they love the script so much

4- 95% of what GYSN crack is actually released for free on vb.org and is not encrypted. they had to purchase a dev-key version of vbSEO to release a cracked version of the encrypted one in the past… but all the encrypted versions are released crypted, like Lionel’s stuff, and yours.

i even got a deal with them so they « beta-test » my versions… i do not have to pay for coders that test my site, they are doing it for free, and with more interests than the guys at vb.org would even have… they are supporting my upgrade, they check my codes for error of performances, they test on amazingly big forums so i can see the impact, and they provide feedback instead of whinning. and some of these guys are better coders than me, so they offer suggestions and debugs.

it’s a win-win situation because i would have to pay way more for real coders to test for me or even code for me than the licenses i do not sell due to the nulled stuff… the guys i work with right now are costly like hell… not the vbTeam guys…

these guys are not interested to know the impact on your life, they are just interested to results. if you do not contact them to ask them to cease their cracking on your scripts, they will not care about the cash you loose, because you just hate them. the only possible thing to do is to contact them like if they were friends… sometimes it works.

for vbtracker etc, sure you loose some clients because they take it for free, but remember that these 95 downloads are from kids with no money, they would not buy the official version anyway. they can only spread the words that it work and is perfect for their need, so the only thing it does for you is some free advertising… remember that google and yahoo are indexing these sites too… put some real xhtml tags in your templates that would key-point to your own keywords.

to make my story short, in the last 5 years i worked with vBulletin, i lost more than 50K$ in scam and crackers… make anybody ask why continue, hey… my last event, a moron from the UK who wanted to protect one of his friend’s reputation, sued me for copyright infrigement… he only forgot one detail… his friend, before dying, gave me the entire ownership of his suite of hacks… so i had to follow the entire process of a lawsuit, paying for a good advocate etc, and that cost me 5000$ to show to the entire world that i’m the most responsible developer on the market. that even made me rethink the opening of vbenhancer.com, because the goal of that site was to support unsupported hacks that i take-over, but also being the first serious coders directory and provider. last month, a friend of mine told me to re-open the site… i thought of it for 2 weeks… that is now the time to do it.

i have the best advertisment program possible, i have the best reputation to spread over the net, i have a network of contact that could make Obama really proud of… and i do it alone, because everybody else is afraid to be locked down by Jelsoft… my goal is the opposite, i want IB to buy that project in 6 or 12 months… with a M in the price. i know where it goes, it will be ok, may be fun too, but mainly i will have a lot of friends visiting in the next weeks.

now, what do we do, you have hard time finding clients for your scripts, you said it earlier:

… because you’re outside the realm of Jelsoft and also because you are hard to reach. vbtracker is not for everybody, it needs a development site to have a use for it. the guys who download it on vbteam have no need for it, they want to see what it is.

we actually have a similar tracker planned for our flagship called MTF… as a addon to a core engine, released in a package with a project planner, a members area, a releases engine *(no licensing manager though)… it’s not to compete your own tool, but we have different goals as a team of 20… the goal is to have a basic engine for all, and a pluggability letting a good coder the possibility to code an amazing extension for a wealthy client… anyway, everything will be explained on my site next week, because the MTF dev-key will be available for any good coders like John…

ok, anyway, did i answer your questions? i always talk too much!

Ok, let’s see if we can get everybody’s ideas about our future clients:

1- they are ready to pay for products that are supported
2- they are not teenagers with no budget
3- they can have master forums with more than 5000 active users
4- they display commercial content, not related to googleAds etc
5- they have roadmaps for the development of their site
6- they are ready to pay more to keep their privacy (adult sites etc)
7- …

I already have something like this for the Discreet Sponsor per Forum, and i think it’s time to make it work independantly to activate more than just a redirect from sponsors… 🙂

a redirect.php file is needed to control all the possibilities of sponsorship and statistics.

i have a sponsors per forum, sponsors for redirects, and we can add more. discreet sponsors are more and more present on the web, in the next 2 years it will be a hit because of the financial crisis… people can not afford 50 000$ Ads campains anymore, so they use the discreet format instead, where they are named instead of popped-up…

 » This forum is sponsored by Gilette « …

😉

i have the file in hands, it’s just some hooks where each Sponsoring Addon we have put a line of code to activate specific stats or technique to display pages.

now i need some backup, some ideas on what tool we need!

We see them everywhere, when we are redirected to someplace, we have a 10 seconds Ad that display a banner or text etc…

What we can do with this situation?

1- a sponsor plan (with the Discreet Banners manager) which let new sponsor buy their slot to be displayed on redirect pages. these purchases are moderated, so have to be approved by the staff (permission based).

2- sponsor locations, redirect pages like: after login/logout, before creating thread in forumX, after posting in forumX, before reading PM, before entering groupX.

3- sponsorship: if someone purchase an Ad for forumX or groupX, they become sponsors of that group… they have a larger display and access…

4- these sponsored ads redirect to the proper place after display. we simply use the default Redirect Messages that we flip with our special template, and we force redirect messages — for forums where the « Remove Redirection Message Pages » option is active…

ok everyone *(rofl)… i start re-releasing my old stuff with screenshots and demo. in the next days i’ll post often, when i have time. i have about 50 enhancements that will be posted on this site, not always installed because some of them are very annoying, but they will be on the demo forum.

these gadgets are for vb 3.8.x only, no backward indication, because i do not care… and because this site is about enhancements, not reverse engineering.

If you want this site to make a hit at his startup, it’s time to release your stuff too. the way i plan it is by having prefixes to identify what category of usage these addons are touching. a better listing than vb.org so.

i’d like to have your suggestions on how would be the best solution for our hacks repository. i’d like a sub-forum per author, but it may become cumbersome if we have hundreds of releasers — even if it is impossible.

this site is about paid support, so for the non-free releases, people have to pay for the support which goes directly in the account of the author. i’m actually doing it with Cash conversion from vbCredits, where the one who receive the cash will have a % retrieved for the site admin pocket… my %… 🙂

if we’re going to have our own points engine, we need something similar too.

i don’t know if we can wait for all these features to be built here, or we can simply replace on the fly when we have a replacement to vbCredits, but i think that the more we wait, the more we loose our market, because vb 4.0 will come in beta in the next 3 months, and a lot of coders will start playing with it.

So, the best way to finance this site, without loosing the coder’s interests?

i am not charging the coders to release their stuff here. btw asking for a % of all sales for the site maintenance is one of the best solution, so it will pay for the charges on the site, and we can continue to release our work without being pointed out sadly.

ideas?

I thought since the project manager was removed I would just show my progress on MTF, so here it is:

COMPLETED:
– MTF Base OOP engine
– Extra Forum Fields
– Extra Post Fields

NOT COMPLETED
– Full Ability To Replace Postbit, Threadbit, and Forumdispaly Templates (Partially done)
– Reduce Code (Combine/Delete/Add Code to make more efficient)

My goal is to have MTF Master done by the 25th

Not at all…

Jelsoft refuse to share their licensed holders list, so nobody can be sure that you can be licensed or not, and i’m not playing the « hidden code » stuff either, so i don’t care, we don’t care.

If Jelsoft wants us to verify the legibility of our clients, they just have to support us…

footnote: we do condemn illegal sites when possible. we have our own ways to see if you fake a license, and if we see this happen, we contact Jelsoft directly and stop serving you… you’ll get banned also!

To hold people over until I get the full updated version with new features released, I’m posting this Interim version that has been tested / updated for vBulletin 3.7.x

There are no new features in this release, it is simply compatability updates and minor bug fixes. There are changes to both files & templates, but no changes to the iTrader tables.

Features:

• Rate another member: Positive / Negative / Neutral
• Specify in each transaction: Buyer, Seller, or Trade
• Leave multiple comments about the deal
• Dates & IPs are all recorded to prevent abuse
• Specify a thread URL to the deal
• Advanced URL checking
• Display ratings over time
• Filter based on Buyer/Seller/Trade/or feedback they left for others
• Users can edit/delete ratings left for others (time based limitation)
• iTrader Admins can edit/delete anyone’s ratings (just incase)
• PM notification when new rating or comment is left
• Per-usergroup permissions
• Lots of admin controllable options

Installation / Upgrade Info:
Read the included readme file, it explains everything.

Standard Disclaimer:
BACKUP YOUR DATABASE & FILES BEFORE IMPLEMENTING THIS HACK!!!

Donations:
This add-on will always be free, however your donations are kindly accepted and will help towards further development. The link is on the right under « The Developer » info.

reference: iTrader 2.1.0 (Interim Release) – vBulletin.org Forum

Today, 09:18 AM, feb 16th, 2009

nexia wrote:

Hi Jason, you know me i suppose, the big mouth of vb.org …

i’d like to see if you are interested to see your iTrader engine taken-over by someone who have more time to support and upgrade/debug it?

Jason, admin of extremeoverclocking.com and author of iTrader wrote:

Sure, go for it. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time.