Torn DIDN'T shut the guy down. He asked the guy to remove the content by emailing him and emailing his host. That's it. His host shut him down so he needs to deal with the host by not giving him the 24 hours Torn gave him to remove the galleries.

Cut Torn a break, he's not an ass. ;)

Thumb TGPS that skim are here to stay and a huge part of sponsors making money. Be real! Call it CJ or whatever you want but they send valid customers to the hosted galleries that do buy memberships.

ohh I didnt know that. That changes things a bit

I am sorry I should have read the thread better

Buy an email list & then spam a sponsor's site & see how fast you get terminated :D

Only if the sponsor get's a lot of complaints. Otherwise, with most sponsors...the advertiser is golden.

Please........... we all know nobody get terminated for spaming

well I know my personal 1st post might have been a bit to strong on the issue and I do believe Thorn has every right in the world to dictate how his content is being used. However the facts I was pointing out is it's general knowledge that TGP's use these kinds of methods to gain traffic and most of us do not conceder it cheating. So I personally think if he didn't want traffic from sites that skim, it should be clearly stated in a TOS. I think most of this drama comes from people that either don't agree with traffic trading or just don't understand it's benefits.

I personally took offense to someone being called a called or implied a cheater simply because I conduct the same sort of traffic trading techniques and I in no way conceder myself a cheater. I typically stay away from pop up's but in all honestly adult webmasters have become far too nice to surfers in not having pop ups on their sites and so on. Pop up's still seem to be a very accepted means of making money in mainstream sites so why not still in adult? Of course I'm not talking pop up hells but 1 pop up or a exit console never hurt anyone IMO.

As far as the toolbar install goes I think koot explained it was from the free host. I tend to believe him being I've seen it happen a few times coming from free hosts or free counters such as porngraph.

Jim,

You are absolutely right 100%..........but this thread has taken on a life of it's own. I think it departed from the original intent about reply number 3. If I was a sponsor offering content for surfers I would be highly pissed. Nasty Dollars has people on staff to ensure that their content is not "stolen" or used in any way not in accordance with their TOS. Skimming is not a good thing at all, as a matter of fact I dislike it immensly, but it serves it's purpose in that if you strike a balance your site can grow in size and get bookmarks. I think most will agree that this is simply a collision of two different "worlds" within the online adult community. And at the end of the day GG would be able to step into the TGP game and have a lot easier time at it than I would have stepping into the link list game, it is all about traffic and sellingn |bananna|

And on the other hand, I think Torn is well on his way to learning a valuable lesson in this biz wether he knows it or not............Just a damn shame it is going to eat up an entire sector of the market to teach him that lesson |sad|

I wish him the best as I don't think he would have wanted it to happen that way. As a matter of fact I would be willing to bet you that a ton of the TGP webmasters are looking at his site and having a good look at the content so they can recognize it at a glance and swiftly decline any gallery or sponsor link submitted to them promoting his stuff........indeed it is sad |sad|

I may be wrong, but I don't recall seeing anything in that ruling saying "thumbnails are fine so long as they link to the original content" ... it just says that using thumbnails does not violate copyright.

And on a lighter note...
 

http://www.katcash.com/htm/content.htm

Every link I try off this page goes to a 404 redirect with a couple of pops.

What were we saying about stealing traffic? :) :)

Thanks rowan for pointing this bug out. I made all my galleries and take full responsibility. They worked for me when I read your post but not for my wife, and thanks to good timing my best friend came over 2 mins later and being the script wiz that he is it took us 5 mins to find what the issue was.



This is somehow included in my hosted movies, maybe due to the embedded videos, I’m not sure. Try them in IE and then let me know if they work.

Unfortunately we are on out way out the door and I will fix this bug as soon as I can.

For The Record:

Silvercash has no problem with links to our hosted galleries from a thumb of our content, having a percentage of clicks redirected for tgp traffic trades.

Why would we???


If you have a question... E me..

bangwang @ silver.......



Richard
3688149

Bangwang
Good to see you, welcome to GreenguyandJim.

Hey Bangwang |waves|

Man, this thread is bring people out of the woodwork!

I didn't add your stuff in because of this. I don't use IE and as soon as I got a 404 I stopped looking at them. Been meaning to mention it to you but kept on forgetting.

Hey Jim ... Hey Mark


I'm just a board luker :)



See you in Hollywood?

Bangwang,

Sounds good to me... I was pretty sure you were gonna say that thou.
I'll keep loading my traffic off in your face then :)

Yes, Jim & I will both be there :)

Funny, last time I saw, Nastydollar's TGP's skimmed too ;)

Wow! I love Torn & Kat, but this is nuts!

From a gallery submitter perspective:


There isn't a single no-skim thumb TGP that I submit to.

That means that 6 or 7 or 8 times out of 10, Kat's thumb would go to the gallery I submitted. The remainder would go to the TGP's trades. So...

If I built a gallery out of Kat's free content & submitted to my list, would:

I have my affiliate account deleted?

My partner accounts be getting C&Ds?

On a more positive note - look at all of the brand spanking new board members this thread dragged in.
|lightsabe

Thats what I wanted to know...

Dealing with the volume of this kind of stuff that I do, I would just say "screw it" to any sponsor that might give me trouble.. My partner accounts are valuable to me, and having one program going around causing unneccessary bullshit with the tgp owners that I've built a relationship with over a long period of time would be... Absolutely infuriating. No way in hell would I promote a sponsor like that.. I can understand protecting your content and wanting to make the most out of each hit, but tgp traffic can be valuable (I should know), and for them to try to dictate what the tgp owners can do, directly or indirectly, is absolutely ridiculous.

Everybody who is running an affiliate program (including Torn) should listen to the advice Jim gave by telling what he would have done in a similar situation:

Listening to Jim's advice will save affiliate programs and affiliates from a lot of unnecessary drama.

Torn,

You have made many mistakes each of which will probably cost you affiliates:

1.
You sent a C&D to your affiliate's host without giving your affiliate time to respond to your complaint.

2.a
You ran to a board to complain about an affiliate without giving your affiliate time to respond to your complaint.
2.b.
You posted your affiliate's whois info and domains on a board called possible cheaters and implied that he is a cheater whose account you already terminated and telling that you wrote a C&D to him and to his host.
Again without giving your affiliate time to respond to your complaint.

3.
You posted your affiliate's private email address and home address on a board.
(this isn't much of a tragedy in this case since Kloot had his home address listed in his domains whois info but about 50% of webmasters don't have their home address in their whois information - including Torn aka PO Box 8xxx - and I think Torn wouldn't be happy if I started posting his home address on message boards.)

4.You were insulting and abusive towards your affiliate by calling him "little piss ant".


These 4 acts by you made sure that I will NEVER touch your program.
I suspect that many other affiliates don't want to see this kind of behaviour from affiliate programs.

Tips for affiliate programs:
Do NOT use boards as the first stop for solving problems (this applies also to affiliates).
Respect your affiliates privacy.(this applies also to affiliates).
Act respectfully towards your affiliates and other people (this applies also to affiliates).
Do NOT make rash decisions in the heat of the moment (this applies also to affiliates).


You will be forever infamous as the clueless program owner who didn't get skimming and tgps but to me you will be just another example of a person who runs to the boards, makes rash decisions, doesn't care about their affiliate's privacy and acts abusively.

Good luck with the path you have chosen.


-justmyopinion

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Leaving aside the question of the skim, which I never found very interesting personally...

Everybody thinks it's just peachy that this kloot character was autodownloading something that set off virus warnings, then?

All of Kloots trades think it's just fine that Kloots thumbtgp was apparently downloading some kind of exploit?

I know, I know, the only proof that's left is Torn's claim, but is it your position that Kloot was innocent of any wrongdoing?

Who's trading with Kloot? What was the url of this innocent thumbtgp?

It seems you didn't read the whole topic.. the exploit was coming from the free host not koot.. but he did have the pop up which is not a big deal IMO. I don't know if you ever used porngraph counter but they did the same thing and started auto installing toolbars via their counter and killed a great service.

I read the whole post. So you're telling me that Kloot never once visited his own site and noticed that his oh-so-mysterious freehost was downloading exploits on him?

Or maybe the "freehost" started it just minutes before Torn checked the link?

Blaming it on the freehost is the oldest fucking trick in the book.

I know all about porngraph. So, are you claiming he still had a porngragh counter on there and that was the source of the exploit? (I know you're not, you are using it as an example. And anybody who was dumb enough to still have a pg counter downloading toolbars off his siite months after it was discovered and discussed on every fucking board in existence deserves no sympathy.)

Who was the freehost owner? Let's ask him about his exploit autodownloading freehost. What's the evidence that the malware was from the freehost?

Who are Kloots trades? Is it any surprise none of them have spoken up?

I bet they do, I am talking about "really" stealing the content and not just "skimming" |peace|

I think the problem here is that some paysite owners lost the reality woth how tgp's work nowadays.

Of course, when our thumbs do lead to autodialers/install and other sponsor, we will complain. But just a do a little more research. Most TGP's skim traffic, and sometimes THOSE trades add autodialing shit etc. It's not that the affiliate link directly to that.

When you don't want that your content is used for skimming, you should add that explicit in the terms, and FHG area, since it's a common way of doing business nowadays. That's what I mean with keep up to date.

Also I doubt if you saw such thumb on teeniefiles, madthumbs you had acted the same way.

Andre

Sixzeros of Comus Thumbs TGP script here.

I just want to say.. the Comus Thumbs network is getting bigger, somewhere around 10mil to 15mil surfers a day.

99.999% of them are skimming to trades.

99.999% of them are running hosted galleries.

If you dont want to be on the Comus network, then get a message to me, and let me know your domain, I can make sure you get purged.

I think most sponsors would rather that I added them though?

It's not peachy, it's just not relevant.

Obviously Torn doesn't want his site & his wife's image associated with a site using trojans or exploits. That's a no brainer. If that was the only reason he'd turfed the account, this thread would've ended on page 1.

What *is* relevant is how a "NO using free content or FHGs on TGPs with skims" policy affects honest, hardworking webmasters. There needs to be a clear list of sponsors who won't allow this.

I see your point of view Kcat, but I see things as being exactly opposite. I think the skim is irrelevant, and the exploit is the issue.

Torn didn't know about the skim. It may come as a shock to some TGP people, but there's a lot of adult biz that doesn't know the details of forced trading.

But his first point, and his first reaction, was to the autodownloaded exploit. Then he meets the skim, which he doesn't know, and gets doubly pissed.

But the real crime here is the autodownloaded exploit. How many thousands of dollars have been spent by just the people reading this dealing with exploit infected computers? And it's not the email viruses that are fucking us, nobody here is that dumb, it's the scumware and toolbars and malicious dialers autodownloaded and deceitfully downloaded.

Now Torn knows about the skim, and this will cause sponsors everywhere to clarify their policies. That's good. The skim was never threatened.

But these fucking exploit downloaders are daily fucking every single one of us out of money, if you'll excuse my language.

Sorry to break into the meaningful conversation...

I read this thread and the gfy thread.

Found it pretty interesting reading- not having a clue about TGP's.

There's no school for adult, so whatever one learns off boards is taken as the way to do things.

...until you read otherwise or see people in real life and chat about it.

Bill, the use of exploits/dialers have nothing to do with copyright infringement or any other gripe Torn may have. That is (or theoretically is) Kloots business decision. Torn can climb as many walls or beat up as many small people as he likes over hitting a page with a dialer ~ but it aint illegal in the context of his gripe with Kloot.

The use of his pics to build a TGP is his gripe...

If Kloot had been forcing trades via a textlink as opposed to a thumbpic taken from his promo material, then this whole situation wouldnt have arisen, dialer or no dialer.

i can't be sure what was in Torn's mind, but I agree copyright infringement is the tool, the legal weapon that makes this case so interesting.

However, this situation has multiple parts. Torn is within his rights to send a copyright warning to the host. We don't have to agree with it, but he has the legal right to do it.

Then, the host owner came here and said "Hey, wasn't us that shut kloot down, we just passed on the message". But because Kloot WAS shut down by someone, it makes a big splash, because it's such a dramatic example of the power of copyright infringement claims as a weapon.

But, it turns out it's Kloots "friend", the freehost owner, who shut him down, not Torn. Torn was as surprised as anybody that the guy was shut down so hard.

So, it's not really Torn who has gutted Kloot, it's Kloots friend, who is also presumably the one who installed the 3 autodownloading "somethings" that tripped Torn's norton.

Does Torn have the absolute legal authority to say "You can't use my content in the skim.". Clearly, YES. Is it a good business decision if you want to be used on TGPs? Probably not but who the fuck knows? TGP owners may think the world revolves around that traffic but it don't mean he couldn't make plenty without TGP traffic.

It was said earlier, this debate wouldn't have lasted a page if it had just been about autodialers, but that is what it's about.

It's an unintended side effect that the copyright threat was enough to scare Kloots cheating "freehost" "friend" into shutting down his crime operation loading toolbars onto the stream of TGP traffic.

I'm reposting this advice by Jim in the hope that more people would learn to act professionally:

Everybody who is running an affiliate program (including Torn) should listen to the advice Jim gave by telling what he would have done in a similar situation:

The skim is relevant to me because I submit to TGPs that skim.

The exploit is irrelevant to me because it's obviously wrong/cheating & I don't cheat, use exploits, dialers etc. etc. Doesn't apply to me.

If this was just a thread about another webmaster who's got dodgy shit on his site, I'd file it under list of sites to blacklist. End of story. But considering the skim "cheating" is a major issue affecting a lot of honest webmasters. Does that make more sense?

I can understand Torn being pissed if he thought he was being cheated because he didn't understand skimming.

I can understand Torn being pissed at the exploits the freehost was trying to install.

BUT BEING PISSED DOES NOT GIVE A PERSON THE RIGHT TO ACT ABUSIVELY!

Being pissed does NOT excuse this kind of BAD behaviour:
running to the boards, posting affiliate's private information, sending a C&D to the affiliates host, calling their affiliate "little piss ant", and deleting the affiliates account - Doing all this WITHOUT first giving the affiliate time to respond to the complaint.


Torn's mistakes:

1.
He sent a C&D to his affiliate's host without giving his affiliate time to respond to the complaint.

2.a
He ran to a board to complain about an affiliate without giving his affiliate time to respond to the complaint.
2.b.
He posted his affiliate's whois info and domains on a board called possible cheaters and implied that the affiliate is a cheater whose account he already terminated and telling that he wrote a C&D to the affiliate and to their host.
Again without giving his affiliate time to respond to the complaint.

3.
He posted his affiliate's private email address and home address on a board.
(this isn't much of a tragedy in this case since Kloot had his home address listed in his domains whois info but about 50% of webmasters don't have their home address in their whois information - including Torn aka PO Box 8xxx - and I think Torn wouldn't be happy if I started posting his home address on message boards.)

4.He was insulting and abusive towards his affiliate by calling him "little piss ant".


Do you want to join an affiliate program who treats their affiliates like Torn?