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Hi Rick and Ted,

I have seen some disturbing patterns over the past 10 days.

You see, I track my traffic now, and Ts25 is ripping surfers off BIG TIME.



Now geez, I dont know how many credits I have sent through the exchanges exactly this week.

But it is SUBSTANTIAL. Tim Linden at StartXchange can confirm, I have been assigning a shipload of credits in the past 10 days.

If you want to look at Ts25 and Traffic Pods, you will see a crap load of campaigns have run and been completed with more presently running.

I have been tracking 3 exchanges and these are the approx (+/- 1%) results.

1.Traffic Pods Average results on 550 hits assigned in a campaign

Result : Pretty damn good, sometimes credits match up perfectly, sometimes 3 to 8 credits short.

2. StartXchange Average results on 550 hits assigned in a campaign

Result : Pretty damn good, sometimes credits match up perfectly, sometimes 3 to 8 credits short.

3. Ts25 Average results on 550 hits assigned in a campaign

Result : Absolute Crap, with a capital C. Anywhere between 403 to 480 Hits delivered.
Mostly below 450.

This over and over, not a one off.

Now Logiscape own Traffic Pods too, are you going to tell me you OVER deliver at Traffic Pods.
Are you going to tell me Tim Linden is over delivering at StartXchange. (You are not allowed to count Tims` CUSTOMER SERVICE) He always over delivers there. You may want to ask if he runs a workshop.

The simple fact is that one of the top ranking TE`s, one of the most expensive TE`s
that would be TS25 is RIPPING members off huge.

I want to be compensated for Every campaign I have ever run on your exchange 20% of all credits I have ever assigned on Ts25.
You don`t want to know but my Wife is really pissed off as well.

How about texascowgirl SDL1 member who also tracks, She contacted you, and you just feed her a load of crap.......you do not deliver all assigned credits.

I am tracking using ROTATOR DX 1 - URL ROTATOR MEMBERSHIP SYSTEM PHP SCRIPT.

Dont worry I am not breaking Terms, I only run one URL per rotator, I use the date and IP tracking feature, as well as counting hits on certain links within the pages I advertise.

Don`t worry about answering this message in private.
I will be posting this in RANTS section at NMF. Answer in public please. You need to deliver to your members what is rightfully theirs

I look really forward to your reply, and be HONEST
Glen Gainsford
Ts25, Traffic Pods and StartXchange Username is lgglobal

Glen,

First of all, I am really disappointed at your decision to post this message in a public forum rather than seeking an answer/resolve through our support department. In particular, I take great offense to the tone of the message that would have others believe we have deliberately done something wrong. I can assure you (as well as everyone else) that we have not ripped anyone off and I would think that given our previous POSITIVE correspondence with you on other issues you have had, that you would have at least extended the same courtesy by trying to sort this out in a rational manner as opposed to using an accusatory message such as this.

Having said this, we were recently made aware of a potential breach in the surfbar through two other emails that we received within the past 5-8 days. Our programmers then analyzed several log files and other recorded information regarding surf activity over the past 5 weeks to determine if there was in fact a breach in the security of the surfbar. It has now been confirmed to me that there was in fact a small group of accounts that were utilizing some program to artificially surf the network. Since the security of our surfbar is extremely high, it is rare for this type of thing to occur, but since we are so hard to cheat and since we are also among the largest of the TE networks, we are a constant target for the cheaters. Now, since our surbar involves such a diverse anti-cheat array, it means that a program designed to cheat it must be quite complex in the way it calls the different aspects of the script. It is this complexity that led to some of the pages not actually getting loaded into the frame when the cheater program was surfing. So, in essence, the cheater got the credit, the member had the credit deducted (because the surf program actually thought the page was being loaded), but the actual webpage was not loading in the frame as it should have. We have identified (through the log history) that this problem surfaced just a little under 2 weeks ago. The program was being used very rarely at the start but within a couple days it was being used by a cluster of accounts (all owned by the same individual).

So, now for the resolve. Our programmers have been hard at work adjusting the surfbar yet again to thwart the cheaters. We have identified 37 accounts that were running this program and they have all been deleted. We have placed a random security check back on the surfbar (I am sure we will get some whining and complaining about this one). We have also added some additional tracking into the surf program to help identify this sort of problem in the future. As I am sure you can imagine, we are always going to be targeted by the cheaters and we will always have to act to correct it. The important thing here is that we have some of the best programmers and we take this very seriously. It is always our top priority to ensure that we provide the best possible service to our members (even if it doesn't seem like it given our sheer size and therefore delayed support at times).

Also, as you know, whenever we uncover a problem that impacts our members like this, we ALWAYS compensate for it with some promotions to put credits back in the accounts of our dedicated hard-working members. On this note, you should see a string a promotions out in the next week or two.

One final note .... I found it quite funny that you bothered to state how you were acting within our terms by only rotating one website on your rotator, and yet you are completely in violation of our terms by selling your ts25 credits. Perhaps I should be asking you to send us all the money you collected through the sale of your credits? Oh, and let's not forget your use of our logos in the creation of your splash pages, which is also in violation of our terms. Need I go on.

Now, I am not trying to start a fight with you Glen, but the next time you have an issue with something in one of our programs, do the respectable thing and seek out a response from us BEFORE posting in a public forum.

I hope this helps to explain things. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience these cheaters may have caused our members over the past 2 weeks, and we look forward to offering some great promotions to help make it up to all of you ... starting right now.

Hi Rick ,

I thank you for your reply.

I trust since you have identified the problem, the percentage of traffic delivered will be now a lot closer to 100%

The reduction in % of traffic delivered is not a new thing.

A post of mine from August 30 this year
http://www.netmarketingforum.com/forum/ ... =1&t=15362

If this problem was identified, why not let your member base know, and let them know you are working to correct the problem as soon as possible. It does not take long to send an email to members. Just plain courtesy.

The reason I wanted this in the open is 2 fold.

1. I hear so often from my team mates that you do not respond. And I know you do.

2. I wanted to see the answer in public so members can see whats happening because you guys do not tell us.

regards
Glen

Rick, thanks for stopping by and explaining things!

Glen, oooooooooooooopps guess you may have been caught in the cookie jar

Cheers!

"I am sure we will get some whining and complaining about this one"

Yeah, that's frustrating. Most anti-cheat features affect accessibility to a portion of members, and so you want to keep it easy to use, yet still hard to cheat.

Often the best anti-cheat features are the most simple ones. As a programmer, I've worked with traffic exchange surfbars that generate tons of random numbers and code that would not mean anything to a potential auto-clicking program. Many of those same surfbars have a static algorithm of images and links that can easily be matched for auto-clicking.

I've never programmed for TS25 so I don't know how well their surfbar is setup. However, all traffic exchange programmers must remember that you are trying to confuse software, not humans. Making the source code look complicated doesn't help if a program can just match the image names with a specific link. The goal is to require matching of text or images that cannot be read and interpreted by a software program.

How effective are random image pixels in this regard?

Ryan,
If want I can talk to you through pms about making your surfbar harder to cheat.. I would rather not speak about specifics of cheat provention and cheat methods in a public forum, I have my fingers crossed that others will follow my lead . I would rather cheaters have as little information as possible, anything said specifically in an open forum could give potential cheaters clues about weaknesses in scripts

Tim

I wonder how much would have been said if it was not pointed out?

Aint life a bitch...I had the idea in August, bought the script to do it, made a few adjustments.

I got held up a bit moving house, and went live the start of last week.

Damn, change of Terms and conditions on October 12 2007 I did not know about.

We will see what happens.

cheers
Glen

Actually, it has always been against the terms to sell your credits. We did make some very minor changes to the terms on Oct 12th, and we posted this in the news section of the site which is where we say we will post changes to the terms. As a member of our program you must check the news and make sure you agree to any ongoing changes in the membership agreement (this is the same as it would be in any program). As part of the changes, we clarified a few items and put some important things in bold face font to emphasize them, but selling your credits has never been allowed.

Now, as for the problem with cheaters, this will always be a reality. There will always be somebody out there trying to cheat our exchanges. In the past we have usually caught them fairly quickly, but they are being forced to really get creative now and this also means they are a bit harder to detect at times. Nevertheless, we are doing our best to keep the cheaters out.

As for our security measures on the surfbar, they are very involved. Yes it is true that the best security aims to make things dynamic so a computer can't figure things out, but beyond that you also need a certain amount of "visual" distortion as well in order to confuse the text or symbol recognition programs as well. This often leads to frustration among the members, especially those with poor eyesight. It is always hard to find that perfect balance.

One final note. We are not going to send out an email message to the entire membership just to let them know that someone has programmed some cheat software and we are working to correct the problem. This would be a pointless email that would only generate unnecessary doubt and panic. 9 times out of 10 we would have the issue contained and then resolved before the email was even finished being typed out. BUT, we always make it up to our members with something good to follow.

Rick, you said it has always been against terms to sell credits. I dispute that fact.

During my surfing at TS25 I have seen pages offering TS25 credits for sale, before reporting those sites, I checked terms, because i thought it was a breach.

There was nothing in terms about selling credits, so I did not report.

Really Rick, the Updates and news sections of the logiscape exchanges I use are update so few , times, I had not looked at them for months. It might be an idea to move the new section on Ts25 up to the top of the page so it is more visible.

If you were aware of a possible breach 5 -8 days ago in security of the surf bar., why not inform members. Maybe they may hold back on assigning campaigns to preserve hard earned credits.
5-8 days of 18-20% reduction of delivered traffic is a crap load of traffic over the whole of ts25 users.

I appreciate any efforts to fight cheaters, by all TE owners.
Rick, Why not set up some campaigns of your own and track hits, then you will be able to see really quickly when there is any huge abnormality. If I can pick it up, any mug can do it.

On a positive note, I am still tracking and I am happy to report that TS25 is now delivering traffic at or very close to 100% of assigned credits. As good as could be expected anywhere.

I do not accuse, I just call it as the stats say it.

Glen

Embedding random characters and numbers into images can be very affective depending on how the surfbar is setup. If you have one output file sending the images to a surfer's computer and one file to receive the clicked link, cheating would be impossible without image recognition or a security hole in your script.

There are image recognition programs available, but very few programmers would know how to create them or embed them into their own auto-clicking programs. It still helps to have a background image with various textures to make the output image more complex.

Josh,
I have to disagree with you on a certain point.. Image recognition is much more trivial than you think..

Tim

I created a script in less than 30 minutes that could "bot surf" (the matching images portion) on StartXchange. Matching surfbar images is very easy. In doing so, I found how to detect it and caught one person doing it.

I'm always looking for new ways to make it harder to cheat, and I have one coming up sometime after thanksgiving for the images themselves.

It should be noted that the numbers and text written out rather than shapes is just as easy. I spend much time reading about these kinds of things and one particular website this guy has been able to correctly read even the hardest to read captchas. So, the answer isn't only in the surf images. This is where the ease of surfing comes in to play =P

Ain't that the truth.

And it's high time that ALL program owners took it on board, reviewed their procedures with a thought to their clients (and not themselves) and DID something about it if indicated by that review.