retard of the week, or how sad the game portal scene has become

at
http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...4&postcount=96
user vhorizons wrote:

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Originally Posted by vhorizons

"I like the Naughty Office game from http://www.newgames2win.com. In fact, I like a lot of their games. The site has a Naughty Games category that provides gamers with harmless mischievous fun.

They have wholesome games too, like sports games, card and bingo games. Check it out. Have a nice day, all!

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its obvios spam easy to spot,- but still I was curious how serios someone like that could be- is he really about providing what the advertisement post states or is it like I always assume - mainly a spam farm using visitors as cash cows.

So I searched a little bit on the net and soon I found this link:
http://www.freelanceprojects.info/20...or-games-site/

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300 links needed on quality sites. and SEO work here is our site - http://www.newgames2win.com/ Do NOT waste your time if you have low feedback. You will waste your time. I need quality work. I will provide keywords when project begins. first payment will be released after 150 link done. project must be complete in time duration Thanks

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that means that the owner (its most likely not them/us/we its propably a single person [marketing slang]) paid others to spam on forums like here on FK to write cool phrases about the site. Thats just sick imo. and just for the record the average sum bid was about 150,-$ for 150 spam comments.

and here are some of the criminals that wanted the job:
http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/...ref=abinowbhat

another job desciption for the same scam can be found here:
http://********afreelancer.com/proje...Need-Link.html


but back about the real problem here, the website newgames2win.com who uses copied flash games from other portals (to many out there anyway), on their about page
http://www.newgames2win.com/page-about_us.html
it reads itself as a templete

Quote:

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About Us
This is where you can put some content for your About Us page or any other page you wish to create.
Our goal is to have more games than anybody else on the net! We will be adding funny movies, cartoons and other content in the near future.

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particulary the (by me) bolded part looks odd- it makes no sense adding just that to the default text.

So I googled up that part
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...22&btnG=Search
and you'd be suprised how many scam sites there are that copy text from each other.
So some of my thoughts are that
a.) the owner of the site can not really write or speak english well,- he rather relies on other sites and basicly rips them
b.) they all belong to the same retard


my point of this thread is to simply let off steam,
I know it cant be stopped and basicly there will be lots of others to try it again here on FK- but eventually some portal site owners will read this and think about what they can do to make their site better and stand up against these irritating sites.

why does it surprise you.

Most of the portals are not really portals and most of the so called publishers are not really publishers, and developers are not really developers. It's just kids with an internet connection, grabing free content and sticking them on their own sites. So called developers are mostly kids with a copy of flash ripping off tutorials.

It's free to cheap, so anybody can do it. They can call it portals or whatever they want, but it's just a site with same crap everybody else has.
Those words ( portal, publisher, developer ) have no real meaning any more.

Its not that easy anymore to see who runs a maybe cheap looking but "legitimate" portal site (one can have lots of games for free in legitimate way by for example taking the freely available games from gamejacket or mochiads (where then the developers get the ingame advertising revenue) and one can also buy a portal script package to set up a portal, so then it would be similar to other portals but still all legit).
Others take just every page from everywhere and every game from everywhere no matter if that´s free or they paid what it costs.
I thought in between about turning the sn page into a portal page with more games than just those i worked on and for that did some research on cms/portal script packages and there i found one discussion particularly weird:
It was about some dudes talking about different portal script packages, then one asked if he could have this and that for free, then the other replied no,that would cost x amount of money and then the other said yeah, i know but can i grab it somewhere for free anyway, the other replied no,that would be theft and then the other replied back: does it matter, the whole idea of making the portal is putting stolen games on it.

So yeah...

I also put some of our games up for free distribution on mochi etc to see how that works out and i often get emails from portals having questions, that´s cool of course but usually those who have most games on their sites have problems with basic embeddinng of a game most often, which yeah, makes one wonder.

Meanwhile i have mixed feeelings about doing a big game portal site, it feels like those who just grab everything from everywhere without asking and paying and sometimes even blocking ingame ads or removing developer links etc make way more money than those who ask each developer seperately to get a nice deal for both sides going as much as possible.

Then there are also sites like that kong.. one who block ingame ads and themselves only pay the developers a ridiculously low share of their ad revenues (seeing how the developer has most of the work with a game) and still they are one of the most money making ones as so many are uploading their games there.
Kinda sadening.

You want to talk about retard of the week, check out this thread:
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/s....php3?t=188726

Some people are POS

crazy stuff.

that surely is a mofo retard but it also prooves what I was complaining about in the first place
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/s...9&postcount=17

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yeah im working for Yo ARCADE game website i only did the backend setup and all for that game and now doing updation for the game plz help me

Once the game is over, it should not go back to the main menu.
Instead, it should show their score in a box.
ill get u some projects also im having now 4 game project this month

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for those who dont want to read it all,- its about a idiot that ripped a swf file decompiled it and has the job to modify it for yet another flash portal/game site - obviously he has not the brains to modify it.

edit:
found a pic of that guy:
http://dhayalan.com/yogsmca/Photo-0021.jpg
from his directory listing where he stores all his ripped flash games:
http://dhayalan.com/yogsmca/

Back to your original pots. You do realize that there are companies for hire that will do it in a more sophisticated way, and big corporations use them.

Basically people who have established accounts on various forums/boards and will peddle your product for a fee. They will appear as members you already may know and it will not be so obvious or stupid as the example you posted. ( very first post: "hey I found this great site I wanted to share" ).

For example if it's a hardware site, some of the mebers being fanatical about certain brands may not just be crazy. They are actually paid to do that.

Hehe why on earth did you find his picture?
Just don't help guys who are clearly trying to rip people off.

It's pretty easy to check if a portal is legitimate.
First of all if you've never heard of it, be cautious.
Check Alexa ranking, Google pagerank, google it and search on forums.

seems that way, sadly

another thing I noticed alot of that work slaves seem to come from india. Propably because its a rather poor country with a good english and internet learning curve- and thus willing people doing work like that.

A nice feature of a message board maybe would be to display flags of the posts orgin (based on the IP) and display on the flag (for example india). That way for example I could make a rough selection (though of course not always correct,- but still perhaps usefull).

Or another rule beeing that a first poster is not allowed to include URL links in their first post - but only text, images links to swf,... but not to sites.

Maybe also a funny script that replaces those links with useless and funny links. We had this once here in the games section done by a mod with another retard seeing that more often would be nice.

I´m not a fan of showing flags to have a preselection option or similar idea for posts, even if there would be a track record of people from certain regions doing certain things to bigger degree i don´t like such thoughts.
We had it for a while that first time posters´threads didn´t appear public until a moderator approved them, if such things occur often we have to do that again.

Hey guys, I don't know who the author is but I just came across this game with awesome graphics, mind-bending puzzles, superior graphics- WOW it had me hooked for --


lol.
Seems like this is another one of those threads that boils down to how to protect your games from being ripped. Kiddies out there are always going to pinch your games from other sites to put on their portals, but with a touch of creativity and smart thinking you can turn this in your favour.
Firstly, code in AS3 so that it's more complicated for your average decompiling Joe to fiddle with. Encrypt your files. Next have your name all over the game, with clear text on the intro screen stating you are the original author, along with your homesite address. Throw mochiads on so even when your game is pinched you can still gain from per-click income.
Really, what's the big d?

hatu: That's pretty useless advice. Traffic is no indication of integrity.

that actionscript.org thread is hysterical... you could almost believe it was a bot.

It is definitely true that in the less developed countries they have even less of a sense of intellectual property rights.. which isn't saying much.

A lot of the more highly respected blogs do paid ads / reviews under the guise of news / self "inspired" articles.

We've even been asked to do them, although we've never sunk that low ( We've had a guest article, but it was a valid well written post and we didn't receive a penny. We're always open to guest articles if people have something interesting to say, we're just not open to letting people know that BigFish is having a sale once a month when we're part of their affiliate scheme for example ).

Also you know when a portal has a top 10 ? Well... it's a bit odd that new games go into the top 10 every single time isn't it :shhh:

Then you've got paid placements of adver-games on the really huge portals ( Which pains me more than anything, and totally devalues what we do ).

Basically, everything is about the money, has been for ages, and it seems us developers were the last ones to figure that out.

"another thing I noticed alot of that work slaves seem to come from india. Propably because its a rather poor country with a good english and internet learning curve- and thus willing people doing work like that."

It's all relative though isn't it mate, that's the problem, the global market isn't an even playing field and never will be.
$150 for a 150 posts to you may seem more trouble than it's worth ( Along with other issues with it ), if you were 13/14 it'd be a lot more tempting, or if you lived in a very poor country then it's paying for your food, ie your ability to live, and it's as simple as that.
I'm sure not everyone doing it wants to be doing it, they take no joy from it, but we've all had to do sucky jobs.

I personally don't blame the people who do it, I blame the person at the end of the food chain who thinks it's a valid way to market a game and for the people stupid enough to blindly click the link and therefore validate the money spent on spamming boards.

Squize.

PS. Is retard a socially acceptable word now then ? I just can't keep up with you kids and / or political correctness :)

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Originally Posted by Squize

PS. Is retard a socially acceptable word now then ? I just can't keep up with you kids and / or political correctness :)

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Nah, it's still decidedly un-PC, but regardless a common insult in our school system.

Personally I think only portals which have exclusive in-house content to offer are acceptable. I'm pretty strict about keeping my website restricted to just my own content, and having plenty of games on it that haven't (yet) been whored out all over the internet is quite nice, in my opinion.

At the bottom of the newgames2win site there is a very clear copyright notice...

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All Games Copyright © To Their Respective Owners. All Rights Reserved.

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See? No problem at all. It's obviously all legal and above board.

And also, wow! at yogsmca. he doesnt even understand the linguistic responses he is getting let alone the code ones. kind of pointless him posting in the first place.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by EvilKris

Firstly, code in AS3 so that it's more complicated for your average decompiling Joe to fiddle with. Encrypt your files. Next have your name all over the game, with clear text on the intro screen stating you are the original author, along with your homesite address. Throw mochiads on so even when your game is pinched you can still gain from per-click income.

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I agree with EvilKris. Also, use Adobe Flex (if you are able) so it's even harder for them to mess with.

let´s just say that´s heavily off and AS3 content usually can be brought back to reuable/readable codeform way more than AS1/2 content.

If you want to mess with them , "flash 5 way" of coding with code all over the place is much more difficult to decompile/understand.

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Originally Posted by tomsamson

let´s just say that´s heavily off and AS3 content usually can be brought back to reuable/readable codeform way more than AS1/2 content.

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The argument was about understandibility. It doesn't matter if ScriptKiddie1337xH@x0r can easily decompile it.

I do agree with EvilKris that if your game is in AS3 there will be less people who can understand your code, as AS3 is generally found to be harder to get into then AS2. Also there are less superspecific tutorials in AS3. If your game is complex enough it becomes even less understandable for an outsider.

My assumption is that most of the illigal decompiling is done by people looking to make some easy buck and/or glory and don't have the discipline to learn coding and math. If you can create the game yourself, why not create it yourself? I don't believe it's because they won't but they can't.

That leads me to conclude that making your coding harder to understand by coding a complex game, the odds of it bieng stolen are significantly decreased. Because the people (kids?) decompiling your games have a hard time understanding any of the code, they have an even harder time to understand which part of it is the security code.

Someone mentioned Honeypots as a tactic on this forum which falls in nicely with this theorem: place blatently obvious security code in the game and hide the other security code around.

another way is to..
generally use custom binary files and external assets (swf, jpg, png, mp3). That way it requires almost reverse engineering aka understanding the engine, code and fileformats in order to change it dramaticly. Such kind of development is another reason for AS3 anyway,- esspecially since you can write custom Binaray data from within the Flash Player 10 to your desktop.

Getting ripped off can happen even if you have a contract with the site. I sold the rights to a game to a site who totally bastardized it and basically ruined it. They added MORE mochiads (in between levels, which made it annoying to play because levels were short), somehow mistakenly deleted graphics making the game look very ugly, and added a useless leaderboard to a game that it didn't really fit into.

Even if you legitimately sell your game, there's a chance that some moron will butcher it up.

just post the name of that hoster,- so that others know who to watch out for

"Even if you legitimately sell your game, there's a chance that some moron will butcher it up."

You get that everywhere mate, I've had it with my first ever sold game to a portal back in '03, to having it with clients forcing last minute changes that just destroy a game.

As to the slightly o/t encryption thing, as3 is a million times more secure than previous versions.
For example, the 651 demo linked to in my sig was protected with our in-house encryptor which stops all the decompilers in their tracks. If you want anything of interest out of that you're going to be getting your hands a lot dirtier than just picking "save as fla".

Squize.

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For example, the 651 demo linked to in my sig was protected with our in-house encryptor which stops all the decompilers in their tracks.

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couldnt agree more. I if you really want a project protected, you should make a custom encryptor / obfuscator.
(its not too hard, as essentially it's just a find/replace on a bunch of files.)

just to share a technique i use...

in all my actionscript code, i put comments like...

Code:

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//[LOCK]//

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and then the obfuscator app just replaces this string with one of many different little snippets of site locking code. some of the sitelocking code is several lines long in itself, and is put in at random.

this allows me to have readable code, and insert hundreds of different sitelocking points where i want in the source code. almost automatically.

also,
i had a whole system of loading encrypted files off my server, with the game logic in it, but then discovered that all the portals actually want you to give them a single, self contained swf file.
so i made another little app to convert an asset into a string (encrypted and sitelocked), and wrap the string with some as3 code to convert it into its object. this also has the bonus of being able to store bytearrays as assets.
it kind of sounds complicated//overkill, but basically by writing a couple of simple apps in vb that do some string handling, i now have a simple way to strongly protect my stuff without thinking further about it.

another point.
if i was decompiling someones as3 code to steal, i would do a search and replace for any occurrence of 'loaderInfo', as most sitelocking techniques use it. so try to use a variety of different methods.

EDIT.
That's an extremely good point about the extra MochiAds. They could add all sorts of extra junk and just recompile it, once youve given it to them, even if they dont understand what's going on in the rest of the code. is there any way to prevent this? what do other people do?
Could the flash file perhaps detect how big it is? and refuse to run if it is larger/less than a set number of bytes? Is there any way of hashing a swf that it can access?

Nice ( The comment way of doing it ).

Our system uses blowFish, basically the entire swf is encrypted using that ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_(cipher) ) which gives a byte for byte copy of the original swf ( So no slow down at all and no filesize increase ).

Then after the preloader there's a class which embeds the whole encrypted swf into itself ( Which limits this to Flex / Flash Develop and now CS4 I believe ) and runs the decryption routine.
This routine is the weak point, but we use a source code scrambler ( http://blog.gamingyourway.com/PermaL...915983a25.aspx ) on it to mess it up.

The version in 651 is breakable, but it'll be so painful to do, and it's a starting point for the next version which will be much nastier.
The advantage we have is that decompilers have to be pretty generic with what they do, they can only really target commercial protection schemes, so they're not hard to mess with thanks to byteArrays and as3.

"They could add all sorts of extra junk and just recompile it, once youve given it to them, even if they dont understand what's going on in the rest of the code."

I guess you mean in situations where you've given them the fla ? Simple solution is don't. There's no need for a sponsor to have your code, and if they insist on it, then that should be reflected in your price.

"Is there any way of hashing a swf that it can access?"

md5 does this well and is available as open source actionscript. You'd only really need the last byte value, so in theory that value could be hidden in a png in your library so it's actually a getPixel which tests the hash, which again would be tricky to find.

Sorry about taking this thread away from the original point again, and turning it into yet another how to protect my swf thread.

Squize.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by renderhjs

just post the name of that hoster,- so that others know who to watch out for

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The name of the group I dealt with was xodo, and they work for YouGame.com. The contract was non-exclusive rights with the right to alter the game for APIs, removing my ads and putting in their own, etc. But, in altering the game they turned it into trash.

xodo offered us a truly pitiful amount for the pinball game we did. They offered what you got basically, a none-exclusive but they wanted the source 'cause they wanted to add it to facebook and obviously couldn't trust us to do it ( They update their api's a lot being the reason, so it's just easier if they have the source. Yep right ).

Obviously I'd rather delete the game all together rather than let anyone have it for the amount that was offered ( $301< ), never mind handing over the source for it.

Wattz harsh way to learn a lesson when dealing with sponsors mate, but looking on the bright side at least it's a lesson learnt.

Squize.