More Awesome Than You!

Is there no limit to the depths to which they will sink?
http://forums.sims-community.com/showthread.php?t=66708

Furthermore, any and all messages regarding this issue on the BBS are being actively locked and removed by Maxoid_Hydra, with the excuse that posts should be kept 'on-topic', and only related to the game or the Sims2.com website.   ::)

I added my 2 cents to the BBS, and suggested that everyone who is angered by this run out and grab ANY and ALL TSR content from PMBD, just to annoy TSR.  Of course, my post was removed immediately.

Ah well, we all know who's Awesome and who isn't.  But I would suggest that anyone who reads this and has any link or account with TSR take any necessary action to protect their personal information ASAP.

As awful as this is, I can't say it is surprising. My only hope is that this latest atrocity makes more people aware of TSR's asshattery and nudge fence-sitters in the right direction. I'm glad to see Delphy speaking out, quite passionately, about this, too.

Thomas is the scum of the earth. He will obviously do anything to protect his cash flow. He needs to be destroyed.

It doesn't surprise me at all, unfortunately. And the fact that Thomas or whoever it was that did it thinks they couldn't get caught is quite hilarious.

He could have gotten away with it if he wasn't a total and utter SMACKTARD, but one cannot expect much from Thomas.

I was just taken aback by the amount of stupidity involved. "I'll just go over there and delete stuff and change their policy, no one will notice anything different and can't do anything about it if they do because I have changed their infos hur hur". Seriously? Someone exists who is that retarded? Or does he think that Delphy would just ignore such a claim instead of investigating?

/me changes her TSR password to fuckoffubastrds and considers downloading as much free stuff as possible to waste their bandwidth ... well as soon as I can be arsed, I will.

Seriously, I am looking forward to TS3 (L&P notwithstanding) because I am hoping this will be an opportunity, at last, to force the avaricious cynics who run sites like TSR, to put their money where their Kimberly Pipe sized mouths are and sue. It would be a cold day in hell before TSR (or any other paysite) stands a chance of winning its case in a proper court of law. Hell. I'd even feel confident as the respondent if I were next up in the same court where Madge Ciccone so recently appeared ....

Ok, this is smart at least as much as EL OH EL I POASTED ZIPPOCAT.

Paperbladder and Fairlight! Do you have proof you didn't hack Buggybooz account? Eh? Eh?

I'm not surprised Delphy spoke out about it.  If anyone did something like that to one of my community members in a similar position, I'd be absolutely livid.

My new TSR password is FUCKYOUTSR.  That's not terribly original either, but I enjoyed making it anyway. 

Also got my first BBS forum bannination today.  Yeah Yay me.   ;D 

Thomas uses hacking into other people's systems quite frequently as a way to resolve his frustrations. When I say "he" below, assume it means "Thomas or an approved 'agent of TSR'".

1. He has ATTEMPTED to hack MATY .
2. He hacked into Coconut's Wordpress blog.
3. He hacked into LJ's simsecret (and possibly other anti-TSR blogs).
4. He has hacked into MTS2.
5. He has revealed the Power Words (real names), home addresses, paypal (etc.) info of his SUBSCRIBERS.
6. He has blocked legitimate paying subscribers from using TSR, even though they have had nothing to do with the paysite / freesite controversy.
7. He has ATTEMPTED to hack PMBD. Also, TSR stooges like Atwa have helped themselves to the booty, including TSR items, while yelling about the booty. (See also Lyric Lee's hypocrisy of raiding the booty while yelling about the booty.)
8. Attempts to discuss TSR's illegal or shitty activities on the official BBS get deleted, and may get you banned if you persist (at the BBS, interestingly enough).
9. TSR openly discusses hacking as a weapon against people / sites who disagree with their shitty policies.

Is that about right? Did I leave any shitty behavior out?

?!@#$%

I get really inspired by this community with so many good tutorials.
But when I see shit like this, it just makes me wanna stop playing the game; delete all my accounts.

I mean really, what is there to gain by going to the depths that this Thomas person has gone?
How many other people could he have compromised in this way?

Don't forget the spyware he puts in all of TSR's downloads.  :p

Your first ban today?  SLACKER!

The updated Securom like info in the files. (Remove watermark, file no longer works) Can't say that I completely have an objection to copy protection that did only that, but not in this instance, seeing as they are selling content that should be free.

Let us not forget REFLEXSims Forum . . .

Long Live BlackPearl Sims!

:D 

I have to admit, it sucks not being able to see what's going on now.  Probably just as well, though.  I was supposed be leaving on a road trip today, but I'm so behind on getting ready for it I'd be optimistic to think I'll be out of here before noon tomorrow.  So it's good thatl I don't have that distraction anymore.  Except wait... I'm HERE now instead.  Oy vey.   :-\

(has lost track of how many times she has been banninated).

Thanks for posting the screen shot. People are *still* making threads about the TSR thing on the BBS even though they were told not to.
And my vacation lasts until 5/29/2009.

Sweet.

(but I have a back door)

Don't forget that WNF still gets hacking attempts every 3 minutes...

I can't change mine, as I'm on the long list of members whose accounts aren't deleted (so as to make their numbers look good) but whose emails on their accounts and passwords were changed. Why? About a year beforehand I had posted in a thread in their forums questioning their practices, breaking none of their TOS, and had been assured by Steve that I'd see no repercussions. Apparently, he's misplaced Thomas's leash.

Wipe out your cookies there and you will be able to see again, like other unregistered users.

HOT DAMN, it worked!!! Thanks, Pes!    ;D ;D ;D

Edit:
Aaaaand... bored now.  There's only one "questionable" thread still posted, and it's locked.  Everything else is deadly dull if I can only look but can't answer questions.  *sigh*  Gotta get packing anyway. 

Boy am I glad my TSR account is from my Sims 1 days. I'm still going to take some precautions, but my username there isn't one I use on any other Sims site now.

I don't even remember what my TSR account is, but my password was something really lame and non-giving-a-shit, like "password". :P

The FOJ actually went to TSR for anything? Oh, horrors-my innocence has been lost!

I've been registered there for since Sims 1. It hasn't improved in 8 years. ThomA$$ has only declined in his dotage-and he's gotten greedy to boot.

But it sure shows how stupid and desperate he is for new creators, under any circumstances.
Maybe in an alternate universe someone could hack TSR to take it down...hmm...interesting idea for April Fools, don't you think?
Perhaps permanently.
All the little sheeple will be so horrified-plus other "alternative sites" will suffer as a result.

Damn. Can't live with TSR and can't shoot it.

Well, where else would you find the community's best smutty horrors, like the Dink uniform?

Let me preface my statements with an amen of condemnation for the recent acts cited.

However, what you have cited here is proof of nothing. If someone posted a random garbage file and called it a stolen file, the only way for the person whose file was purported to be stolen to know it if it true would be for them to download it themselves. The existance of their IP address in the logs shown looking at their own stuff does not mean hey came there to 'raid the booty'.

If you want to do damage, don't throw pebbles; find some rocks. Or ask Pescado to lend you a flamethrower.

That would be true, had they not raided the booty for other sites they had nothing to do with, and got logged while doing it.

Oddly, I cannot logon to TSR, although the last time I tried some months ago it worked fine. Oh well, no loss.

Maybe the site is just overloaded with people trying to get in and change passwords.  :D

You probably should change your other passwords as well- they can probably get access to your old passwords in the backups. I don't want to sound too paranoid, but if they are that nasty, they may be making a record of the logins and IP of anyone who has recently changed their password. After all, only those guilty of treachery would need to.

Well, in their eyes it's treachery. I'm more of the opinion that my privacy may be invaded and I find that offensive. My account is so old I've had it since sims 1 days - I know they will probably have backups but I wanted to let them know I knew what they'd done. If that makes sense.

It does make sense. I just wanted to alert people to the fact that just changing the password won't necessarily protect them from being hacked on other sites, if you leave the old password on the other sites.

Bingo.

And wes_h, the logs are actually available (or were) if you know where to look on PMBD.

In other words, U R WRONG.

Or you could upload a whole bunch of recolours........

Just because ... I was looking for medieval content and Google responded to my desire for a medieval stove with, among others, this bit o' TSR 'goodness' (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/Cyclonesue/downloads/details/category/sims2-objects-furnishing-appliances-cooking/title/Medieval%20Stove/id/155845/). Yeah! Medieval == bad joinery ... and carpentry don't get much worse than for the boards' edges to change from one elevation to another. It's also subscriber only damnit ... must ... resist ... urge ... to susbscribe. ::)

Lovely.
Also, the modern-looking wooden sink with its wooden faucet is... er... well...

...

Another TS3 preview, right?

I changed my password over there without problems, you don't have to confirm your address. Under Password section of Edit My Account menu you type your new password and then verify it, click on Change button, that's it.

You are too wrapped up in this to see that your statement is petty, whiney and proves nothing... the logs show she looked, and prove nothing about use. If you want to win arguments and converts, use provable assertions. If you just want to be perceived as a whiney bitch that dislikes some ho, well, carry on.

Nice bit of the bleeding obvious ... I  read janeyw's complaint as meaning she was unable to recover her password (presumably forgotten but still needed to change the original) due to not having access to the email address she used when she originally registered and was consequently bogged down in some labyrinthine mire of her own making. All of which conjecture leads me to wonder why janeyw felt an overwhelming urge to change a password that is almost certainly is of less use than a tracksuit to a Russian crewman on the ISS.

I just love that, in all of this, the party line from TSR is ,"Oh yeah, we were hacked a few months ago. Must have been them."

I'm sorry, did TSR just ask us, in the face of an overwhelmingly damning mountain of evidence, to accept the "My little brother must have logged onto my account" defense? To accept that some lone hacker out there in the wilderness somewhere just happened to use Thomas' account (while mimicking Thomas' IP address) to do a hostile takeover of the account of someone who just happened to have made a complaint against the site this lone hacker had allegedly ransacked? Oh, for fuck's sake.

Not only does that story strain credibility past its limits, it also utterly defies logic. Given the lack of mention of other accounts being cracked, it is safe to assume that Buggy's account was specifically targeted. On the same day s/he lodged a complaint against another site. The owner of which's account info just happened to be used by this lone hacker. Who conveniently obfuscated his own IP address to match that of the allegedly hacked owner's. And who randomly selected "switch this target's policies to say 'paysite friendly'" as a change to make on the aforementioned very day s/he lodged a complaint against a paysite.

Okay, no, that doesn't seem very likely. So maybe the story is that this person didn't "just happen" to go after Buggy; maybe this one-armed man hacker knew about the complaint and targeted Buggy because he loves TSR so very much and wanted to help them? Y'know, help that site he'd previously hacked and stolen the account infos from? Because he loves them so very much? And masked his IP address so he could pretend he was Thomas while he was doing it?

Not buying that one, hm? How about: the same lone hacker who happened to have Thomas' info and wouldn't ordinarily have any idea that TSR just had a complaint against it just happened to find out about Buggy's complaint and chose to mess with Buggy's account so that it would look like Buggy had no leg to stand on in his/her complaint in order to set Thomas up to look like he had violated Buggy's account despite the fact that the methods he chose to do so would normally never actually point to Thomas and thereby stand little to no chance of actually coming back to haunt TSR, only this time it happened to work?

Yes, that must be what happened.

My brain hurts.

There's one thing I knew about TSR: they were bad;
and there's one thing I didn't know about TSR: they had become that bad!

Oh gosh! It's such a shame to the Sims community when the so-claimed largest and oldest Sims fan site has grown that nasty and hideous >:(!!!
Let's mourn for the days when there are no such sites! :-\

So if they are 'looking at' content, we should assume the same for everyone else that goes to the Booty to 'look at content' they had nothing to do with.

Roughly translated, she had a succesful response from the server; HTTP 1.1 protocol, status code 200 means "OK". GET method means the entity SML_Set2_AphelionTV.jpg was sent in response to the client. In short, the SML_Set2_AphelionTV.jpg picture appeared on her Exploder 6.0. It was 8386 bytes long.


Another OK in response, this time 97382 bytes were transferred. Oh, look, what kind of PICTURE is a .rar file?
But wait, she didn't download: the ws_pleasure.rar file is bigger than 97382 bytes, right?

Right. In fact...

Status code 206: partial content. Usually used by clients to resume a download. Typical log line when a downloaded file is big, and the protocol has to deal splitting the stream of data served. Another 2,555,733 bytes. Wanna do the math?

Is the RFC 2616 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616) a source reliable enough, for you?

If their member database had been compromised in any way then surely the members should have been informed about the breach at the time and advised to change their password(s). Smells like a steaming pile of kermit flailing bullshit to me.

A .rar file, yeah, we can all tell what is in a .rar file just by looking at the title. No one ever posts anything unless it is exactly what they say it is, you can trust the title implicitly, therefore if anyone looked at the file, well they must have been rummaging through the booty. No, there is no other explanantion except that she is just like everybody else, they all want the booty. You are so smart, yeah, you have it ALL figured out.

If you leave the doors and windows open, you can't complain when anyone looks through them. While you have "proven" she looked through some files, you haven't really proven anything else, you have just characterized it that way because you don't like her or what she said.

Barking at the moon will only make you look looney yourself.

Has anyone seen the updated sticky from Maxoid_Hydra on the BBS?


This is just getting ridiculous....It's purely sad now.

Heh. That's an interesting new defense I'm waiting to see pulled the next time someone claims not to be pirating something to their ISP: "I wasn't pirating it, I was just looking to see what was really inside!"

Actually, what you exactly stated earlier was:


and guess what? It's technically correct. I would, too, in their shoes, do the same thing: check my stuff.

That's why I quoted, as an example, stuff by other sites.


I can't prove she used those files to help to cure cancer, either. Or to sink a ship. Hey! I can't even prove she was at the computer; 't was her retarded sister.

Dude, get real. If I come home and find a turd on my carpet, I don't worry about how to find conclusive evidence and report my cat to the Supreme Court.
I characterized it that way because it's the main, obvious, and logical suspect any thinking being would have. Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Wes_h = Nohead = Manga_moon

The "but...but..." argument is nearly identical, and one of those connections has already been proven.

You'll notice that I shrugged and stopped arguing with that particular  Stupid. Arguing with Stupids wastes my time, and Stupids refuse to get a clue.

You could find a series of logs, emails and screenshots of a TSR apologist admitting they raided the booty while whining about it and that they hacked some websites, and a Stupid would waste your time claiming you made it all up in Photoshop.

At some point, you shrug, go do something else that doesn't risk you getting any Stupid Cooties on you, and let Stupids marinate in their own puddles of Stupid.

Baldrick:  First you marinade it in a puddle.
Blackadder: For how long?
Baldrick: Until it's drowned.

Well, I "get" that she isn't well liked. And she can come here and defend herself, I won't do so. And I stipulate that you are correct on the facts here, that she looked at stuff from other sites. Hey, the curtains are open, people can look in.

But when you go on a tirade and toss shit around that is such a weak argument, it makes all of the rest of your arguments suspect, too. Bark, bark, bark. You will note I didn't disagree with the general sentiment, just that statement. It just looks like the sort of petty, vindictive accusation that it is, one that does not enhance your overall argument.

Now that I completely diverted what we were talking about, I will add in my $0.02. Some may not know that TSR required FAs to use some free tools I made for their mesh creations. I didn't mind, because I made them for people to use. But I am tired of the sort of community destructive things that come from there, such as the idea they will make tools and not share them.

It is also no secret that I am interested in working with TS3 when it comes out. While I cannot guarantee I will be successful at that effort, betting against me is ill advised. But this time, terms and conditions will be different than in the past, via restrictive licensing. Those restrictions will not apply to items created for free distribution. The rest of the details are undecided, pending actual creation of anything new.

Yeah, I got pissed off, too. I know all of the non-TSR parties involved, it is so stupid and childish, if it wasn't so mean spirited and destructive. They pissed in their wheaties.

Your main arguement appears to be that LyricLee is too stupid to know what a .rar file is.  Last time I bothered to look her stuff was .rared so that doesn't hold  up.

Doesn't speak well for either your gullibility or IQ. 

No, I was pointing out that Lorelei's basis for characterizing Lyric Lee as a pirate herself relies on a weak connection, and looks like it was born from animosity. You no more have proven that from those logs than you could say that someone who picked up an item lost on a street and looked at it was in posession of stolen property. There is no other way to examine the contents of the booty, or even see the index of a RAR file, except to get them onto your own computer. You cannot assume she automatically took those files, placed them in downloads and tried them out merely from the logs.

You attack those people with which you do not agree, and when your arguments fail, you resort to name calling, as always. The behavior matches children on a playground, bereft of adult supervision. The next step will be putting your fingers in your ears and pretending I am not here, as you do with Celestard, and go running to your daddy to ask him to make me go away.

Grow up.

If you truly believe that LyricLee downloaded the number of files that she did, from the number of sites that she did, just to look at the contents, then it is you with fingers in your ears. If she had only downloaded her own files, or only a few, your argument may have been plausible. To use your own analogy, this is like finding someone with stolen goods on a daily basis. I might give that person the benefit of the doubt once or twice, but after that I would get suspicious.

I found this quite amusing to read: http://www.thesimsresource.com/articles/myths I take it it's a bad April Fool's joke?

That is good enough. I am not going to start counting log events, or attempt to determine if "daily basis" is correct or an exaggeration. I will, however, concede that I was wrong about this being an indefensible characterization. I still think it is useless in an argument about Thomas' behavior, which is where it was cited.

That has always bothered me.  That most if not all of the tools for creating custom content where freely shared, and here they are making a profit off them.  

This is like the irony of Walt Disney getting the government to extend copyright laws so they can go on milking profits from stories they got from the public domain in the first place.  That's like shitting in your own bathtub.

I am just wondering : All of you have an account at TSR ?
Why ?

You know, Kutto really didn't say anything that Lorelei hadn't already stated, he merely rephrased what Lorelei had said.  When Lorelei says it, you claim it "looks like it was born from animosity", and when Kutto says it, you say "that is good enough".

My spider senses are detecting some animosity here, but it's not from Lorelei.

I don't give a crap about LyricLee, beyond being well aware of her nuttiness. Also, the Army of Twelves prodded into attacking Delphy and trying to recruit Pescado (all because LL got caught being an asshat, repeatedly, was removed from her position of pseudopower, and was out for revenge for her hurt butt) was lulz. I think I still have the logs. Medico FTL.

I have no animosity towards LL. I think she's a big LOLcow, that's all.

As for Stupid being inconsistent about accepting the same info from different sources, I believe I have hurt wes_h's little feelings in the past, or something. I probably used logic and/or facts to poke a pin in one of his rants, but I don't remember. He apparently does.

No, Lorelei, you called me stupid right here in this thread.


What happened in the past is past. I forget the crap soon enough; I can't even remember the handle of the gal that called me a pseudonym for a penis, which, while I have one is not the center of my existence. My original point was that your argument is weakened when you use weak points in it, but having said it with my usual grace and charm, I ignited an argument over whether the point is or isn't true enough. I agree with most of the sentiment expressed in the thread, which originally revolved around Thomas and the events reported about BuggyBooz's account at MTS2.

So feel free to call some more names if you wish. I intent to give up on the issue with this post.

TSR hosts all my lots for me free of charge and people can find them to download.  From a very narrow perspective, that works well for me; it's much less effort than running my own website and dealing with downloaders &/or hackers.  They aren't charging me or anyone who downloads my lots.  I downloaded a lot of stuff from TSR free when I played Sims1 and also when I only had base game for Sims2.  I didn't feel guilty about wasting their bandwith; actually I didn't know what bandwidth was back then.  So when I had some lots I quite liked, I put them there - seemed like a fair exchange.  They're there forever now.  I like the challenges and challenge wizard too.  If I was starting over with my rather higher knowledge level, I still want someone else to host them. 

I guess I'm one of those people who always sees grey instead of black and white.   TSR provide a web hosting service and you could argue that they are charging for that as much as the downloads.  The amount - well that's a different story.

btw I'm on holiday now for a couple of weeks

I have an account on TSR because in my early and naive days of TS2 it was one of the first fansites I stumbled upon, and I even had a pay subscription over there.

I have an account on TSR now, because I can't delete it. It's like catholic baptism: once you've got one, you can't resign nor change your mind, forever and ever.

When I got my account on TSR it was still part of Mgon, and free with ads.  When they transferred to the new system my account went with it.  And, as has been repeated, you can't delete any account with them and they don't winnow out unused ones.  This is probably to keep their advertising accounts fooled into thinking they have more actual traffic than they have.  "We have a million bazillion members!!  Pay us monies!!"

I had a sub many years ago, but stopped when I discovered simsfilevault. Even if I wanted stuff from The Shit Repository, I would rather get it clean from the booty. Cwykes: do you know if they watermark your free lots?

MTS2 does this as well, and you don't have to worry about your lots getting marked as subscriber only. You also don't get the bad taste in your mouth. As for the challenges...it's a good concept. They can be fun. Recently, I downloaded every challenge onto my test account and created a 'hood for all. I then realized that many of the lots were packaged with tombstones and with stray bits of data about those dead sims. The 'hood never made it to my main account, and I did a good cleaning of the test one just in case. I also don't trust their challenge wizard. Due to all the other instances of privacy violation they've been caught in, you never know just what data they are gathering.

Anyways, I have an account (which I can no longer access because they went back on their word) there, unpaid at this point, for the same reasons Marhis did. I no longer go there on a regular basis. Actually, it's probably been at least six months since I've gotten anything that originated at the site. My downloading overall is down just because I have so much stuff already. I really only check MTS2, 4ESF, Holy Simoly, and Mango Sims2 anymore.

well, this Thomas person sounds like a slimy toad frog.  >:(

 Why don't somebody fire him or is he an owner of TSR?    I am through with them because I don't want any spyware in my downloads.

He is the owner, Thomas is the one who pulls all the shots.

They aren't charging, but they profit from it nonetheless whenever someone who downloads your stuff sees advertisements on the page -- something that wouldn't bug me much if they just stuck with advertisers to make money. 

When I got sick of their greed, I moved to MTS2.  Continuing to upload stuff to TSR would have easily been seen as an endorsement.

Total noob contribution to the drama: use the right tools.
www.evernote.com  and take snapshots. You can share the snapshots. And it is free.

Back to lurking mode.

Normally I don't get involved in the TSR related drama, but I am sick of the tracking method TSR used a while back (it has since been discontinued so far as I know) being called spyware. Get your facts straight, people! Spyware is much more malicious than what TSR put into the package files. All TSR put into the packages was the user ID, IP address, and date that the package was downloaded. (And they have come out saying they did so here (http://www.thesimsresource.com/articles/myths).) That's it, and it had no effect on the packages when placed in the game that I ever saw. Plus, what they stored in the packages is less than what is kept in some cookies you get from nearly every website you go to. So don't call it spyware. Unless you consider cookies spyware, in which case, go ahead, but that doesn't make it right.

They put that info IN, but removing it makes the item unusable.  By re-downloading their items from the booty, TSR are getting the user name, the ip and the PERSONAL INFORMATION of that downloader, and then breeching privacy laws by posting those details in the forum.  Then they ban that user for being a "Pirate". 

It may not be "spyware" but it's horrendous that there is something added to the file regardless.

A techie friend of mine has mentioned that the data may be at the beginning or the end of the file, surrounded by junk code in order to disguise it, due to it being harder to insert into the middle than it is to insert at either end.  If the "watermark" was removed and replaced with junkdata containing the same checksum the file might work.

Bull. You have no idea how package files work do you? As a matter of fact, the Compressorizer removed the watermark when it recompressed the package (initially anyhow, it did change at some point), leaving the package intact and usable.

Personal information from an IP and a timestamp. Right. Granted they cross-checked and figured out who it was, and then posted their email address and username in the private staff forum. Hardly a breech of privacy laws. But whatever. If you have a problem with your details being added to the package files you download from TSR for your use, then don't download from the site. :P

Your techie friend doesn't know anything about the package format either, does he?

Actually, I'm not very shocked about the whole TSR watermark issue; I think it's fair game: it's their stuff (except Shakeshaft's, of course :P), they want to track who downloads what (according to informations they already left on their site - IPs and email)? Fine for me.
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine that downloaders (and PMBD) want to get rid of that, and preserve their anonymity in file sharing. Again, fair game.
Putting a watermark in a package is lame, but alas, being TSR it's not surprising. isn't it?

A more sophisticated system would have put the user details in a log, and placed a transaction ID in the package. Then it is just a number, not so easy to recognize. While this method is simple, placing the watermark in the same spot consistently is easy to find and fix with a hex editor. It is not so easy to do a lot of locations unless you make a more sophisticated program that can bury it within some of the data items inside the package.

That would be truly devious, but would require a skillset greater then the average bear.

That would actually be easier to detect and defuse than the current system!

That was the original system, but naturally, it was such a miserable failure that it was defused accidentally.

They did that. It didn't help.

It would, but their kung-fu is weak.

Did you forget that when a watermarked TSR file was changed using the wardrobe wrangler, it would cause the game to crash? Major fucking pain in the ass.

This is lies and propaganda. They put a lot MORE in there. We've seen it.

Please elaborate.

Actually I do remember that, and it was a pain, but eh, it was probably partly a coding error on my end. The problem went away so I mostly forgot about it. :P

Yes, please. I didn't really examine any packages past the first watermark, but I can't imagine what ELSE they'd need to put in there.

Add me to the elaborateplz crew.

I don't want to have somebody take off on me as supportive of their work, but I can guarantee you it would be significantly more difficult to find a watermark were I to want to put one in a package.

Still, the act of banning the people right after the packages were uploaded would trigger the "spidey senses" that something was in there. So the act is self-defeating, because if you look long and hard enough, you can unravel any mystery.

Such a thing might be more difficult, but ultimately it is pitted against an obstacle of mentality: TSR has no one really to do this, so they'd have to bring in people to slap together something that no one really cares about doing, while their enemy is boredom: People who have nothing better to do than tear them apart, who DO have technical skills.

I have no idea what the law says about this, but my sense of morals is offended.  When people give an email address to join a site, they expect the admins to be able to see it.  They don't expect non-admin content creators to also see it.  If it had been shared only between the people who were supposed to see it, there would have been no need to post the details on the forum, the admins could have looked at the database for themselves.

Plus, they didn't just post email addresses and usernames--they posted some people's real names, even admitted by Steve himself over at TSR.  There was no need for that and it is considered a privacy violation.  I could actually understand sharing usernames of known filesharers (not condone, mind you).  After all, people freely share the usernames of known forum trolls.  But to post real names is going too far.

Has anyone else gotten this while simply browsing at TSR?
http://minena.prismbaby.com/images/ScreenShot166.png (http://minena.prismbaby.com/images/ScreenShot166.png)

I didn't click on anything but "next" for the next page and BAM, there it was.

While it's true that visiting TSR can harm your computer, this looks like something that is just caused by crappy adware spam links from the advertisers they link to.

Thanks...I wondered if it was from all the craptastic ads they have.

I only go to browse for pictures of what I will eventually get at the booty.