One mule and my main account are left. I'm going to start with the second most exposed account I own. Better Business Center. The BBC was based off the real life BBB (www.bbb.org if you want to know more). I honestly hope you have permission to see deleted threads, because otherwise I'm screwed in these explanations. I'll start from the beginning. The BBC lets people post their opinions about minishops Gaia has in its minishop forums in one convenient thread*. When I renovated the thread to allow for more room for petition rating and to rate Journals I moved everything in the list over to my guild Miscellanea. As you can see, that guild is a key factor here. At the time the journal update had not happened so a journal rating system seemed very useful and would become popular. The BBC had over 200 minishops in its list and many comments in those journal entries. Only the BBC was allowed to post into these journal entries**. The Better Business Center could not have botted. First off, the entire format that these entries are made as: Forum - Nameofshop CLOSED (if it’s closed). As you can clearly see in thread* the forms do not ask for what forum the threads are in. They only ask for the name, the link to the shop, customer's name, why they like the shop, and how they rate the prices. The reason I stated that the forms do not ask for the forum the thread is in is because that information can be seen in any of the journal entry titles**.
Now, I have personally gone through all of the entries counting the number of comments made by the BBC into one of these entries. There was one mod, whom I will not name, who was very kind enough to tell me the amount of gold traded through the BBC into GinoLeTV. 48180 gold, items are various, a Jan 2007 letter, chest, house items, pants, vest and shirt went between GinoLeTV and the BBC. I will assume that all the gold went one way, out of the BBC. Before the ban I think the BBC had about 14K in gold. That makes about 62,000 gold earned in seven months. The first post in the forum is 50 gold. The first journal entry of the day is 50 gold. The first comment in any journal entry is 40 gold. I would, if I could, list how much gold I got for commenting, journaling, and posting, but the only one of the three which is predictable is journaling. It teases you with 50 gold as the first post and the next one you make will always be 1 gold, if anything. I went through the archives** and counted how many comments were made and how much gold the BBC received for making a journal entry. It’s quite simple, thanks to the fact that the dates are there, I know I would get 50 gold for that post and 1 for any other shop added to the list on the same day. Armed with this knowledge I went into the BBC’s Journal History and counted all of the comments and journal entries made. There are 214 journal entries made, most of them minishops, and a grand total of 491 comments. I also took careful note of the date the journal entries were made, so that I can add up the amount of gold the BBC made by simply making the journal entries. According to Excel, I made 5,211 gold making the journal entries, making 50 gold for the first journal and 1 gold for any other journal made on the same day.
The reason I did that was to clear the name of 5,211 gold as being botted. The other 55,000 gold will be later. For this I will use Shrijani's Sparkles*** as an example of the other journal entries. The entry looks like this:
“Shop Title: Shrijani's Sparkles
Owner: Shrijani
Link: http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17726683
What the shop does: Beautiful premade/custom/semi-custom bumps, banners, avi pets and I've seen some avi art there too!”
This shop was referred by Blazing Crayon at this post**** filled out the form like this:
“Shop Title: Shrijani's Sparkles
Link: <image used>
What the shop does: Beautiful premade/custom/semi-custom bumps, banners, avi pets and I've seen some avi art there too!
-*~*-
Your Name: Blazing Crayon
Why I like this shop: Shrijani is amazing with bumps and custom banners and her avi pets are absolutely adorable icon_heart.gif!! She's fast, courteous, and her prices are very good for the quality of graphics she produces!!
Price: Coins 1, maybe 2”
Here is what I did in a step by step process of logging into the BBC and logging out. After logging in I would immediately go to the GStore and click on the Daily Chance and work my way Home. It is a force of habit to do this and also to preserve any Private messages I get. When you get a private message and go to My Gaia before viewing the private message page, then your new messages are not bolded. For some odd reason, I like seeing the new messages bolded, so whenever I get a new message and I’m on Community I right click on the thought bubble top open up my private messages. Then I click on My Gaia and get the Daily Chance and then proceed to the home page. After closing that tab I go to the open tab (FireFox) with my private messages are kept bolded. Weird, huh? From what I heard, no mod has access to private messages, but if you do you will see one labeled “Codes for Business” with a 7 or something after it. In it there is the template forms I copy pasted and then copy pasted any information that was given to me (or even what wasn’t given to me and impossible for a bot to know) by the customer. Then from the first page of the BBC thread*, with either the help with the tektek toolbar or with the now standard mouseover navigation I would open up, in this order, the following windows in a new tab: Page with the oldest new form in the BBC (usually the last page), Journal, and Mail. Please note, that I would only open the mail before opening the My Gaia page if the BBC got a new message which was a rare occasion. What I would do for a brand new shop to be added to the BBC list is click on the small archives list; this was because the button to make a new journal was not available that way on the old and the new version. Of course I would then click on the green button to make a new entry and paste in the empty shop form which looked like this:
“Shop Title: SHOP NAME
Owner: USERNAME
Link: http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=00000000]http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=00000000]http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=00000000
What the shop does:
”Before I go on, you need to know that around the same time the BBC closed to update its entire links list to be compatible with the journal update, the BBC also exceeded the tinyurl bandwidth, and many of the shops had closed and had not told the BBC. There was also a shock that the Better Business Center thread* had fallen off the top 100 Gaia Threads list so I rushed to fix everything. In the mean time, I went and posted in the shops which were affiliated and posted a message in there with the BBC mule. The message looked like this:
“Hey! I think that it may be time to fill you in on the latest of the Better Business Center. For one thing, the BBC has organized itself so that Petitions can join in on all of the fun of being rated by supporters. I knew early on that this would mean serious page stretching (Vertically) on the front page. Never fear, for the BBC is now housing all of it's links to shops and journals in the new guild Miscellanea. This move means Gaians can rate more things in the future like User Journals or Profiles. Well now that I told you the good news I think its time for the bad.
You may or may not have noticed the BBC been closed for about a week and dropped off the top 100 threads. This is due to a barrage of glitches and just plain bad luck the BBC has gotten. For one thing, the update of the journals have made all of the BBC's links... useless. I was told by a greenly colored mod that they were working on fixing this glitch. Though I doubt this I have found out a way to fix it myself; I did not know that the basic format of the links have changed from this:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/index.php?mode=view&p=0000000
to this
http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/journal.php?mode=view&post_id=0000000
All of the BBC's links are in that first link's format making the very foundation of the BBC outdated. Armed with this simple knowledge the BBC has gotten a very small group of people to weed out all closed for long since inactive shops from it's long list to be more helpful to potential customers. Your shop is still active. If you linked back to the journal entry dedicated to this shop in the BBC, I suggest updating that link.
A second problem occurred which forced the BBC to close. The images used to display the numbers stopped working. We have a general idea as to what may have happened and it is easily fixable. Problem is that 2/3 of the BBC's shops have the image displayed report number. So after all of the inactive shops are weeded out we will go through updating the report number codes. If that did not make sense then just know that it is another thing that is delaying the return of the Better Business Center.
Once all of this is over, fixed, and running smoothly, the Better Business Center will enable the option to rate user journals and reopen.”
My guess is that if it wasn’t the hacker wanting revenge (long story/most likely unrelated) that reported me as a possible botter, then it was the last 34 posts the BBC made in the minishop forums. They consist of the form above modified to personally apply to the shop it was posted in. It is in no way random threads that the BBC posted in with that message which was half informative and half an advertisement. If it is in fact these posts that red flagged the mule as a botter, then you are mistaken. Had all of the posts looked EXACTLY the same then you have grounds to say that the BBC botted, but the fact is that there is one thing that these posts do not have in common that marks them as custom posts that were simply copy pasted and would be very inefficient for a bot to have done this. No, it isn’t the time in between the posts. It is the url in every one of the posts linking to the journal. The first link was compatible with the old journal but no longer works for the new one. If this has been fixed since early June, it doesn’t matter because I was still going back and change all of the links. Anywho, for each shop that I posted in, I also edited those two links to relate to the shop. In the case of ♠|Casino Players For You|♠, their journal number is 6555895. They are the 6555895 entry in all of GaiaOnline to go into the journal. That number is completely related to their BBC assigned “Report Number” which is the same exact number. The reason I call it something else is to make it sound cooler, and to hide the real number the BBC has in its arsenal. Sure it has 200 now, but back then it had 2. So in the Casino thread*-* I posted the pasted template above only modified for the Casino shop. The only difference is the URLs included as an example were edited to:
“http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/index.php?mode=view&p=6555895
to this
http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/journal.php?mode=view&post_id=6555895”
which only made sense for the shop Casino Players For You. The shop [Flying Toaster] sees the links but with 9475751 at the end of the URL. Sure, I admit that this doesn’t sound too far fetched for a bot to do. But when you think about it, why would I make a bot or even get a custom bot for the BBC to make less than 50 posts. Even if you’re thinking that the reason that there are so few is because the BBC may have been banned before 200 of these posts could be made, please consider the fact that the last post was made on June 1st, 2007 and my accounts were banned June 7th, 2007. I would have had basically a week between the time of the last post made on the BBC and when my accounts were banned to just leave my computer and let a program make those posts. One more thing that would have made those last few posts not botted is the fact that this super amazing bot which you claim can run the BBC would have been able to tell a closed/inactive shop from one that is closed. What did I consider inactive? One were the shop has closed and the first page acknowledges it somehow, or the last post (or sometimes the last post in the last page that thread; slow connection made me impatient to wait for the whole page) to have been made 20 days prior to the day of the cleanup. Some shops never made it past 10 pages before they were abandoned by the owner of the shop. When I found a shop which had been closed or inactive I would go to the reference thread*-** and delete the shop and everything associated with it under the shop name completely removing it from the list. Nothing more annoying to a customer looking for a shop in a reference thread than one with tons of dead links and dead shops… like some I know *coughcough*. As proof of this being something that can be considered something to prove your accusations wrong that the BBC botted, look through each and every shop on the front page just before the last few posts. None of those shops are closed--and if one is, I bet it closed/became inactive after May 20th. THEN I went to the BBC official’s thread* and went to the post with all of the minishops listed for, mostly my, convenience and click on the “Edit” button and find the shop in the list and type “CLOSED” after it; this went for the inactive shops, too. When a shop was open, I just left it alone and moved on. I had abandoned the plan to inform all the shops because the progress on the update was going faster than I could inform the shops in time.
Now, back to what the Better Business Center did normally before the Journal Update happened and became the first of the BBC’s big problems. After I pasted that template to make the new journal entry I would use the trusty CTRL+TAB shortcut on FireFox to switch between the Post an Entry page, the shop thread, the BBC page with the form, and the page in the guild where the customer filled out the form. From the post page, I went to the customer form page in the BBC thread* and copied over the Shop’s Title and name a mental note of the specific forum the shop is in and pasted the title in the Journal subject field, after “Shop Title:”, the main list, and in between the and tabs in the thread in the guild*-**. Then I went back to the shop’s thread and found the first poster and copied their name over to the journal post page. Then the link was copied over to the journal post page, guild thread*-**, and the Main List. Then I shortcuted to the customer’s form and copy pasted what the shop did; this was so people can tell that one shop made chibis’, but naked ones and another made chibis’ but with clothes. It was a way to tell what a shop did rather than know that they did graphics. Finally, after all of that I read what the person says for the price. Often times they make a comment and based on that I make the judgment on if they mean really cheap or really expensive. If what they say can be interpreted as anything in the middle, I usually just place a question mark. Sometimes I get lucky and they just tell me how many coins to put.
I also beg an explanation on how a bot could tell the difference between a random post and a form. Or better yet, how a bot could automate everything and occasionally be thrown for a loop with an older form that was saved on the front page of a few dedicated shops. Take the Feedable and Breedable Pets shop, they had the old (old) first version of commenting on a shop. Unfortunately for them, they lost half of their comments because their customers were too stupid to realize they actually have to FILL IT OUT. Often I would see the olive form with the blue header, with the instructions on how to fill it out intact. How would a bot tell if this was filled out or not? Occasionally, I got tired of filling out forms for FBPets that were shorter than the actual form itself that I skipped a few and hoped no one would notice.
To make a bot that can do all this sounds like a complete waste of time and effort. There is one subtly that I do after I enter the shop which I think completely clears the BBC of botting if nothing else. To get some extra gold I informed the shop that they got a new rating in the BBC. This takes up ALL of the Better Business Center’s post history, with the occasional “All the posts have been added” post. But rather than bore you on what I do when I type those, I will instead just go straight to the one thing that really puts a c***k in your accusation that the Better Business Center was used run under a bot program. Go to any random page of the BBC’s posts and read any of the posts in a minishop informing them they have gotten a brand new comment. Notice anything? In those posts there is a piece of information given that is just impossible for any program, no matter how great the programmer. The gender of the customer is included. “Yeallow! I have some good news! USERNAME has entered a comment in the Better Business Center. <Whee-emote> She came to us to tell other people of her satisfaction of your shop. The BBC has moved to make room for petitions and journals. You can find your shop here.” In that example it says “She” but there are many times where “He” shows up. The only way to tell the gender of the avatar would be if you use the wonderful gift of eyesight, something bots do not have.
One last defense I have for my mule is, if you can see Private Messages, to look at the few self PM’s I have, most titled the same thing. “Codes for Business”, you will see templates that are basically abused by being copy pasted repeatedly and all that. Take note of the dates of some of the older ones. I believe there are a total of three or four. If not, check the sentbox or something. Check the form for the new Journal. The last section says “What the shop does:”, but in the older versions it says “What the shop does?:”. For some reason, it took me months to remember to just delete the question mark from the template since I usually had to do it when I was filling it out. Though on rare occasion I would forget and leave the question mark there.
* http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18997363
** http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/journal.php?mode=archive&u=5087529
*** http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/journal.php?mode=view&post_id=9597653&u=5087529
**** http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?page=96&t=18997363#1175372835
*-* http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26861925&page=46#1217543593
*-** http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=8990459 (permission needed)
