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Admin

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  2. Trouble with upgrades/payments/subscriptions

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    There seems to be something strange going on the forum software (the part that handles upgrades/downgrades/etc). I have received a lot of PM's from various members who are not getting automatically upgraded, people who get automatically downgraded when they are not supposed t, etc. I am currently lolking into these issues and replying PM's as fast as I can, now that I am online.

  6. how do I support?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    hello everyone,

    I want to be able to sell a few watches nothing special and have to support the site is this the correct one month membership "Standard - Pay automatically once pr. month" that will allow me to post in the sell zone?

    Thanks

    Yes.

  8. Forum dishonesty

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

    post-1-127214356614_thumb.jpg

    So what does it do? Well, here is an excerpt from the description;

    What does this do?

    After importing this product you will have additional options in the Administrator Control Panel below the 'Fake Community Statistics Options' section. This plugin gives you the ability to cheat the stats on forumhome (and a few other locations) by increasing the real value with a false value. The goal of this plugin is to helps new communities boost their activity by pretending they are bigger and more active; provoking visitors to register and participate to generate real activity (after which the admin can stop using this plugin)

    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;

    post-1-127214405922_thumb.jpg

    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;

    post-1-127214430039_thumb.jpg

    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

    post-1-127214497345_thumb.jpg

    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?

    post-1-127214521751_thumb.jpg

    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)

    post-1-127214522735_thumb.jpg

    Notice any similarities?

    This is a quote taken directly from the information about this tool;

    Does this come with templates or require me to modify my templates?

    No, no new templates are required. Original values are overwritten.

    Yes, two template modifications are required if you wish to show 'x members chosen not to be displayed' on memberlist.php and add fake online users to the online users list. (see install instructions below)

    Screenshot

    post-1-127214616117_thumb.jpg

    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!

    post-1-127214616117_thumb.jpg

    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:

    post-1-12721487869_thumb.jpg

    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!

  12. RWG is changing

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

  15. Server moved

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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.

  19. Database crash

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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 ;)

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