Admin

Send a PM to me, TwoTone or Nanuq and we'll sort it out.

As most of you know, we passed 25.000 members this week. Quite an accomplishment and I have to admit that after running forums like this for almost 10 years, I felt proud of what we have accomplished. I was actually going to make a big fuzz about how we are the biggest and best forum around. Now before I was gonna do that, I figured it was a good idea to check the numbers on the other forums. I rarely visit any other forums as I usually have my hands full and the little time I have left I spend here. To my surprise I discovered that Repgeek claims to have 27.000 members. That's 2000 more members than we have. I remember visiting Repgeek a while back and they were nowhere near our numbers, so I was really surprised about this. I mean; kudos to them for managing to get tons of new members, right? Unfortunately, it seems that Repgeek is intentionally misleading all their members and visitors with their numbers. I'll give you the facts here and you can decide for yourselves. Let me just say this; Honesty and integrity are 2 things that I value higher than anything and I take pride in saying that we have a team here where all team members care about these 2 values. I always thought the forums where here to talk about watches, first and foremost, but also to reveal the scams and dishonesty out there. To see another forum being dishonest in this way is a big disappointment. Here is the short version; Vbulletin has a modification that you can download and install that is called "Fake Community Stats": http://www.vbulletin...ad.php?t=117933 and Repgeek is using this. So what does it do? Well, here is an excerpt from the description; Basically it gives the admin of a vBulletin forum (That's the forum software Repgeek is using) the ability to cheat every imaginable value of the forum; members, active members, posts, etc. Long version OK, how do we know that Repgeek is doing this? First, let me give you the technical side of this and how you can prove this yourselves; Basically all the forums you visit today rely on some sort of database. Whenever a member registers for the forum, they are given an ID in the database that refers to their member/user ID. Since I was the first one that registered, my ID is 1. The forum then uses a value in the database called "auto_increment" that will add 1 to the ID of every new member that registers, so that the second member that register will get ID 2, third, will get ID 3, etc. You get the picture. Since we are using Invisionboard, this value is referred to in the database as member_id; As you can see, the "auto_increment" setting is specified under the extra-settings. This setting is also the reason why we currently have "only" 25.000+ members, but our ID's are all the way up to 28.000+. Over the years we have deleted inactive members, duplicate members, etc. so even though we have 25.000 members, the ID-system will show a higher number due to the deleted members vBulletin uses the exact same setting, but in their database, they have a userid-field, not member ID, like we have; Why are thes ID's important? Well, they are basically used all over the place as references to your user. Let me show you what I mean: As I already said, my user ID is 1, so the link to my profile is www.rwgforum.com/user/1-admin/. As you can see, the ID is used to get to my profile. Another example would be our latest member who have registered, bucko911: As you can see, he been assigned user ID 28518 in our database. (For reference, you can also use a "non SEO" link to view a profile; http://www.rwgforum.....php?showuser=1 Just change the number at the end with the user profile you want to view) Well, now that we have the technical details sorted out, lets have a closer look at RepGeeks numbers: The first thing that I find strange is that when I click on their lates members, this is the link I get; http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=21643 Well, there is your first proof: Repgeek currently has 21.643 members. How do we know it's not more? Because it is clearly stated on their members page "6000 members have choosen not to be listed", so how do we know it is not more? Well, let me show you something strange then. This is a screenshot taken from the page I mentioned above. The Fake Community stats (Address is highlighted for verification purposes, Feel free to log in with your valid vbulletin-license to verify the screenshot) Notice any similarities? This is a quote taken directly from the information about this tool; Screenshot Also, feel free to log into your Repgeek profile and see if you can find a setting anywhere that let's you hide your profile? Can't find anything? Let's do an experiment: If you want to view a profile at Repgeek, this is the link you need; http://repgeek.com/member.php?u= Since they have 27.000 members, let find their 25.000 member; http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=25000 Hmm...that's strange (Well, not really!) - Invalid User specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator! Oh, well, lets try a couple more; http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=25859 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=23256 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=24831 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=22571 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=24194 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=26891 http://repgeek.com/member.php?u=27000 Same result for all! In fact, you can try any number above 22.000 and you will find a members profile. Now keep in mind that I have only shown you what is wrong with their member numbers here. This module can also add posts, add active users, etc: Repgeek can of course do as they want, but if you ask me this is both dishonest and deceiving, both to new and existing members and this is the reason why I am posting about it. My request to the RG team would of course be to remove this and come play on the same playing field as the other forums do, with real statistics and real numbers. No matter what they decide to do, the facts are here and you can decide for yourself what you think about this practice. One thing is for sure; You wil never see RWG do something like this!

Aha...returns a white page for me. I'll add it to my to-do list.

Do you still have this problem?

I wll have to look into that *Writing it down on to-do list*

Just posting a little warning her that we will be working on some changes for RWG over the next couple of weeks. So please bear with us while we do some "constructional" work in the background that might lead to some server downtime, error-messages and unresponsive servers now and then. We will, as much as possible, try to include the members who support the forum and have upgraded their memberships, so more details about things coming up will be posted in the supporter-section of the forum.

Should be fixed now.

Well, what the he** would you want to do there anyway Getting any particular error-messages or anything?

Hey all Sorry for the short notice, but our datacentre informed us that they needed to move our servers to one of their other alternate locations, so this is the reason for the downtime these last 8-9 hours. Please let me know if you notice any speed changes, as we have changed from using apache webserver to litespeed, something that should make things load faster. If you discover anything that doesn't work, please let me know by posting in this thread.

All indexes rebuilt and the search engine is back online

Fixing it now.

iT guy...as in T

Well, it took a bit longer, but we are finally back. Database server crashed unexpectedly and managed to corrupt our database at the same time. Latest database backup has now been restored, but 6-9 hours of posts/PM's/etc. are gone, so feel free to post again and please make sure you check up on your PM friends if you have sent PM's earlier today, as these will be gone. Sorry it took so long to get things back, but to be honest, this caught me a bit of guard while I was at my regular day job

Just wanted to let you know that our search engine is online again and the search function working again.

OK, the search engine is now back online

Hmm...better take another look then.

There....

Hmm...looks like the search engine stopped during some preparations I've been doing for some...um...stuff I'll go and put the power back on

Thanks for the review. Love to read these posts!

Hi guys Have any of you updated your credit cards on file with PP or similar actions? As this will cancel your subscriptions with us. You should be able to use the "Upgrade membership"-link in the top menu and if no, PM me and I will look into it.

Well, just upload the images you want to upload and the forum software will format them for ya

@deltatahoe; You can start by reading up here http://www.urbandict...erm=dingleberry

Had to laugh when I saw this in the description; unmolested & serviced Do you guys remember Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction; "The way your dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes gonna put their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright, so he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you. " Guess it's a good thing it is "unmolested"

Help-link in the top right corner; http://www.rwgforum.com/index.php?app=core&module=help

Well, hopefully the system is now fixed. Any volunteers out there that can try it out and send a dollar or two that I'll refund immediately? Link in the top menu or go here http://www.rwgforum.com/donate/