Castle Paradox

[Shadowiii]

I was glancing over RMZs OHR-Date review and decided to check on its download count. Lo and behold look what I saw.

OHR-Date
"Day Before:" 300 something (haven't checked in about three days)
Download count: 582

For those who are stupid and can't remember, this has happened before:

Pitch Black
"Day Before": 440 something
Download count: 603


Someone is definatly screwing with this. A game just DOESNT GET 280 DOWNLOADS IN ONE DAY. Whoever is doing this, whether they think "OMFG IM HELPING SHADOW" or "OMFG SHADOW SUKZ" I AM ASKING YOU TO STOP NOW. YOU HAVE TOTALLY SCREWED UP ME ENJOYING SEEING HOW MANY DOWNLOADS MY GAME HAS RECIEVED. I HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY.

And ifyou hit Stop or Crystal Globe next, I will seriously kill somebody.

This is really bugging the hell outta me (and it shouldn't, because I really don't care about download counts. I just thought it was fun to tell people that my game has been played by 400/300/etc. people. But now I have no idea. THANKS A LOT).

Seriously. And I think it happens when I'm asleep, because I always seem to wake up and these things have happened. GRR.
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But enough talk, have at you!

[RedMaverickZero]

Yeah I noticed too. I usually check on some people's gamelist to see their average download count. I haven't downloaded PB since I lost my computer that plays BAM. And I have downloaded OHR-Date once. Someone is messing with you and I think we need to try and catch this person, although it will be tough because we can't tell who downloads games. This isn't right at all and the person doing it needs to be banned.
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---------------Projects----
Mr.Triangle's Maze: 70%
Takoyaki Surprise: 70%

[Fenrir-Lunaris]

Just to point something out, It's only 5 downloads away from knocking Timestream Saga out of the #6 slot.

Cue sarcastic Fenrir mode...

For conspiracy theorists, this might indicate that someone has a grudge against me. If whoever it is who's doing it is planning to gyp the system for that reason, why don't you download "Logan's Adventures" "Fat Frog" "Magnus" "Adventures of Patamon" and "OMGTITROXORS" some 4000 or so times apeice and knock FFH off the charts for good? Go on. Do it. We'll see you in comic 7 of OHRweekly for sure.

[Bob the Hamster]

Only the web-server logs could tell for sure, but don't automatically assume that it is a malicious person trying to mess with the score. It could just as easily be a stupid web-indexing robot stuck in loop where it shouldn't be. Or perhaps the download link was posted on a message board or newsblog somewhere and was downloaded by a bucnh of people who never even realized that the world of castleparadox.com existed outside that one single zip file... or maybe it is just a malicious person trying to mess with the score :)

Oh, and another thought, has anyone else ever played with ther web-browser's "bookmark subscription" feature? Both internet Explorer and Mozilla-based browsers have it, (though they call it slightly different names and put it in slightly different places) But anyone could easily say; "Hey, this game is cool! I'll bookmark it, and set it to notify me when it updates... hmm, better make it check every 10 minutes. I don't have a life, and I don't want to miss an update!"

So, um. Yeah. BANG! I am a SQUIRREL!
(pleasedon'ttellBobIsaidthat)

...mmm, yeah, I think I need a nap.

[Shadowiii]

Actually, Fenrir, my greatest fear was that someone would accuse ME of cheating, hence why I thought it was a conspiracy (some disgruntled person against me trying to turn people on me). Hopefully I cleared it up that I don't care about download count, besides I enjoy looking at it and thinking "Yay, 200 people have played Pitch Black", etc. <offtopic> Timestream Saga! Ga! Still have to finish it and review it! BLARG too lazy. </offtopic>

James - Yeah, it could very well be, but the fact that they were both MY games was what it made me take notice. I should probably skim the gamelist and see if anyone else has an unusual number of downloads recently. Either that or OHR-Date got links on some big fat site and got amazing publicity in like, a day.
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Inferior Minion]

OK...I looked into it Shadowiii...here are some interesting results:

[junahu]

I hope you catch whoever's 'screwing' with the scores then.
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[LeRoy_Leo]

[Fenrir-Lunaris]

IM, do you still have a list of troublemakers' IP adresses? I would check it against them before you ban anyone (if at all). I've a suspicion it's someone we've had trouble with before....


Let's round up the usual list of suspects...



Forum Nazis/People with Vendettas


People who add nothing new to conversations (borderline spammers)


Members who often make themselves look like fools (hey! It's a mime!)


Flame War Starters

This isn't saying of course that I'm accusing anyone in particular of doing this, though my gut feelings turn out right more often than not. I'd simply check that adress against any others that we know belong to known troublemakers. Who knows, we might be surprised. And Shadowiii, considering how good Pitch Black and OHR-date (even though I don't really like the latter, I cannot discount the fact that it is an excellent game for what it is ), honestly they deserve the places of notoriety they're claiming, regardless of the fact that someone intentionally boosted them up that high. I'd say that given enough time anyway, one of those two would have usurped my spot.

[Shadowiii]

IM - That's very interesting. Hopfully we can catch the crook.

The interesting thing is it seems they clicked on my Hamster Republic Gamelist link over and over. That's interesting...eh.

Thanks for looking into it for me.
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But enough talk, have at you!

[Eggie]

I can understand the creator of the game trying to make it look all high and mighty, but the chance that Shadow, being humble, would try to do that is really not possible. It's Shadow, man. He's like the epitome of humbility.

[Bob the Hamster]

There is a saying:

Never attribute to malice, what can easily be explained by stupidity.

Or in this case, I will amend it to read, Never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by software (though some would argue that's basicly the same thing)

Seeing that the http referrer of all those log entries was the gamelist.php page on my own dear hamsterrepublic.com, I checked my own logs. Interestingly enough, neither ppp182-232.lino.sympatico.ca nor the IP address it points to (142.217.232.182) appears in my logfiles for April 4 2004. So I expanded my search, and seached from March 30 up to the present. Still no hits from that visitor.

While I was scratching my head about that, I decided to search for the user-agent string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)". I don't know why I bothered, as it seems a really common user-agent string.

But then I noticed something odd. Somebody was making very rapid requests to many of my files too. I saw rapid-succession downloading of both custom.zip and wh_demo.zip and other files too... all zip files, not html... and each massive batch of downloads came from a different IP address! What the what now?

So I examined nine days worth of log-files, searching for rapid-succession downloads of any file from any IP address... this taught me that there are a truly remarkable number of people out there who have nothing better to do than spend all day reloading http://HamsterRepublic.com/dyn/bobsez, but after I filtered all those out, what was left?

Most of the remaining rapid-succession downloads were from ip addresses that were obviously web-proxies. The rest? The vast majority of them all had that same user-agent string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)", a very generic user-agent string indeed! ... so generic, it might even be fake?

And even before I had finished researching this, I had already figured it out. This is the work of not a malicious person determined to screw up the download counts, this is the work of a person -- or rather a bunch of people -- who quite innocently installed some sort of web-proxy or download-accellerator or download-manager software. This software makes multiple requests in succession whenever it encounters a "download" file type like .zip and it uses a fake generic Internet Explorer User-Agent string because it doesn't want to be blocked by those few stupid sites that block-non-IE web browsers. This is the very same software that some download sites that only allow a single download per IP address like to warn their users not to install, because as soon as they try to download a file from such a bandwidth-limiting site, they will auto-ban themselves thanks to their download-accelerator's aggressive requesting.

So: Does that explanation appease the torch-and-pitchfork wielding masses?;)

[xaero]

maybe there computer wasnt loading so they got angry and kept clicking on the link (i dont know if that wuold do it but maybe)

and maybe there not against you just against one of the games on highest hits
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hot box vaporizers

[Bob the Hamster]

I think I have even found the specific culprit. I looked at a list of every single request to HamsterRepublic.com in the last 45 days that used the user-agent string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)" Virtually all of them were rapid-fire repeated downloads of zip files. There was almost nothing else. I noticed that quite a few of them had the referrer: http://baixaki.ig.com.br/site/detail13550.htm which I followed to a Brazillian download side which links to Wandering Hamster. A look at their top page http://baixaki.ig.com.br/site/ revealed a prominent advertisement encouraging their users to try Download Accelerator Plus 7.1 from Speedbit software. A look at speedbit software's website revealed that DAP does *exactly* what I guessed. Read http://www.speedbit.com/DAP7/FAQ.asp#3

[RPGCreations]

Solution:

use IP limiting to control download counts

compare IP of downloader, if already in DB, no increment. Make very strict, so all AOL users can count as seperate people, too.
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