3 days ago, i had a chat with Robert, because he was stressed out about the guys at vbTeam who are stealing his stuff… he also think that i am involved in the GYSN stuff, so here is what i posted him:

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first, i’m not involved in vbteam at all… actually i’m doing the opposite. each time someone release a tool from one of my friends, i contact these friends and report the hacker, and most of the time, the problematic purchaser is tracked… have been done for vbSEO and Gio’s stuff last week. i hate releasers, but i had to find a solution, so instead of tracking the guys who are at level one, the real hackers who crack the systems, i decided to make a deal with them…

that deal is simple. i talked with the guys of GYSN and vbTeam, and made sure that they would not crack my official releases, but instead would spread the special version i give to them, nulled by me. that way, the kids who use the nulled versions have the official version, and the crackers have nothing to trace… they don’t know how to crack the official version because they don’t have to… and they do not have to use a false credit card to purchase any version, because they have them… i’m not fooled with bad credit cards either, so i don’t loose a penny.

the reason why i do that?

1- i don’t loose money from crackers who use false credit cards on my paypal, so my reputation on paypal is clean

2- no cracker is interested to look at my challenging licensing code, so my work is safe for a longer period

3- there is not enough nulled-users to be stressed about. for the possible 5000 clients for a script, about 100 are using a nulled forum. they will fade anyway, or purchase an official version as they will require support because they love the script so much

4- 95% of what GYSN crack is actually released for free on vb.org and is not encrypted. they had to purchase a dev-key version of vbSEO to release a cracked version of the encrypted one in the past… but all the encrypted versions are released crypted, like Lionel’s stuff, and yours.

i even got a deal with them so they « beta-test » my versions… i do not have to pay for coders that test my site, they are doing it for free, and with more interests than the guys at vb.org would even have… they are supporting my upgrade, they check my codes for error of performances, they test on amazingly big forums so i can see the impact, and they provide feedback instead of whinning. and some of these guys are better coders than me, so they offer suggestions and debugs.

it’s a win-win situation because i would have to pay way more for real coders to test for me or even code for me than the licenses i do not sell due to the nulled stuff… the guys i work with right now are costly like hell… not the vbTeam guys…

these guys are not interested to know the impact on your life, they are just interested to results. if you do not contact them to ask them to cease their cracking on your scripts, they will not care about the cash you loose, because you just hate them. the only possible thing to do is to contact them like if they were friends… sometimes it works.

for vbtracker etc, sure you loose some clients because they take it for free, but remember that these 95 downloads are from kids with no money, they would not buy the official version anyway. they can only spread the words that it work and is perfect for their need, so the only thing it does for you is some free advertising… remember that google and yahoo are indexing these sites too… put some real xhtml tags in your templates that would key-point to your own keywords.

to make my story short, in the last 5 years i worked with vBulletin, i lost more than 50K$ in scam and crackers… make anybody ask why continue, hey… my last event, a moron from the UK who wanted to protect one of his friend’s reputation, sued me for copyright infrigement… he only forgot one detail… his friend, before dying, gave me the entire ownership of his suite of hacks… so i had to follow the entire process of a lawsuit, paying for a good advocate etc, and that cost me 5000$ to show to the entire world that i’m the most responsible developer on the market. that even made me rethink the opening of vbenhancer.com, because the goal of that site was to support unsupported hacks that i take-over, but also being the first serious coders directory and provider. last month, a friend of mine told me to re-open the site… i thought of it for 2 weeks… that is now the time to do it.

i have the best advertisment program possible, i have the best reputation to spread over the net, i have a network of contact that could make Obama really proud of… and i do it alone, because everybody else is afraid to be locked down by Jelsoft… my goal is the opposite, i want IB to buy that project in 6 or 12 months… with a M in the price. i know where it goes, it will be ok, may be fun too, but mainly i will have a lot of friends visiting in the next weeks.

now, what do we do, you have hard time finding clients for your scripts, you said it earlier:

… because you’re outside the realm of Jelsoft and also because you are hard to reach. vbtracker is not for everybody, it needs a development site to have a use for it. the guys who download it on vbteam have no need for it, they want to see what it is.

we actually have a similar tracker planned for our flagship called MTF… as a addon to a core engine, released in a package with a project planner, a members area, a releases engine *(no licensing manager though)… it’s not to compete your own tool, but we have different goals as a team of 20… the goal is to have a basic engine for all, and a pluggability letting a good coder the possibility to code an amazing extension for a wealthy client… anyway, everything will be explained on my site next week, because the MTF dev-key will be available for any good coders like John…

ok, anyway, did i answer your questions? i always talk too much!

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