Updates!

Granted, it has been little over a year since my last contribution to this blog... I guess you could say that I have been a slack in regards to that.

We've all been busy doing our own personal things and whatnot that we actually forgot to formally congratulate, and welcome, Pursuited to our administrative team. This particular user has been striving for greatness on our community and has shown us that he's worthy of being a bigger part of it. Ron's busy with college, I'm busy with university and Seth's busy being Seth.

This is just one big change among many to come. With Pursuited promoted from SMod, we do need someone to fill his very big shoes. We haven't made any concrete decisions yet as to who, or how many, people that will require but we do have certain people in mind and guaranteed you will all be the first to know - as soon as we do.

That said, at this point in time the general consensus among senior staff is that we're going to require new, competent trial moderators. So, if you are interested in becoming a moderator of GamerzPlanet, now is the time to apply. Remember, though, we do have certain requirements... outlined below:

• IRC Activity. You will need to be on IRC frequently (for sake of argument, lets say go on as much as possible for at least a week).
• Post Count. We know there's people whose wisdom will greatly exceed their post count, but we've got to know you're competent and active. As such, we'd like you to have around 150 posts, at minimum, before applying.
• Professional and positive attitude. We'd like for our staff to maintain credible, kind and helpful. Try to keep all of your posts professional, spam-free and flame-free.

These are the three main ones we look for, along with little things like wanting to help rather than wanting power. Put a bit of character into your application and you'll be given a lot more consideration. Keep in mind, the bullet-points criterion must be met before you apply. We won't consider you if you say "oh, but I will be on IRC".

Again, congratulations to Pursuited on his promotion, and good luck to everyone who'll be applying to become a moderator. The following links are very important to you:
Mod Application Guidelines
Mod Application Section

I would also encourage everyone to join our live chat (also referred to as IRC throughout this post) even if you don't plan on applying for a staff position.

Regards,
James.
GzP Administration.

Bids for GamerzPlanet

As I said in the inititial joke thread, server rental is approximately 300USD a month whilst both ads and premium membership brings in ~500USD.

I'm surprised at the number of people that actually thought I was serious and emailed me offers on GzP. The first offer I received was at 100USD, at which point I thought I was going to be getting ridiculously low bids on GzP for the rest of the time people were under the impression it was a joke. The thread said we're broke not that we're stupid. I received a few more "flyff hax plz" emails before another serious (?) bid - up to $10,000. Reasonable offer. I then received another ~10 emails enquiring server rental costs, site income, and current bid status. Here's your bid update, if you still want to email me bids then go for your life.

GamerzPlanet could potentially earn upwards of a thousand a month in ad costs, so keep that in mind - it's a long term investment.

GamerzPlanet.Net for Sale

Due to fraudulent clicking and ad cheating, resulting in the termination of all ad contracts and a black listing of GamerzPlanet on most ad networks*, as of next month, there are no longer any funds for the dedicated server rental. The administration is looking for reasonable offers (one lump sum, you'll be handed over all site rights, then you'll need to continue to pay server costs) to purchase the site. It is then up to the buyer's discretion whether he or she would like to continue running GamerzPlanet as a game-hacking site, or convert the site into anything that (s)he desires.

We apology for any inconvenience which may be caused by this, but, as of next month, GzP will be down unless we have a serious buyer. The winning buyer will be the head administrator in effect immediately.

All serious offers should be emailed to rav3n2k@gmail.com, or to my PM inbox on GamerzPlanet.

Negotiations will be finalized online, and the successful 'bid' will be rewarded the site. A binding contract will be faxed and signed by both parties, and then kept in the buyer's possession for future reference (in case of dispute).

Regards,
r2k on behalf of the administrative team.

* - Once domain name ownership is transferred, this blacklisting is removed.

GzP will re-open shortly.

After a substantial amount of downtime, the operating system that the server runs on has been reinstalled, as has the HTTPd (Apache). We'll probably keep the site down for a few more minutes just to verify that everything is in working order. Please be patient!

We've decided to take the opportunity to update the board software, to enhance the features on the site and patch any potential security vulnerabilities that may have existed in the older version. We won't be long! Until then, get on IRC.

The link to the jIRC applet should be working now, as I've reconfigured it. For those of you connecting through a regular client, please use the following information:
Server: 72.20.15.252
Channel: #GamerzPlanet

Alternatively, you can use irc.xploitirc.net to be routed to one of the network's various leafs.

Regards,
r2k.

(Last updated 7:16 GMT+10 25/10)

GamerzPlanet; Game Hacking Community?

I'm going to say something that may seem completely beyond belief... something that may change the way you think about GzP... or not.

GamerzPlanet is a game-hacking community, and has been for as long as I can remember. I'd say that's at least 2 years, to stay on the safe-side. In actuality, it probably has been a game hacking community for substantially longer, but that doesn't really matter.

In my time serving GzP, this argument has been brought up twice, so I figured I'd publicize our justification for certain decisions. Whether a "hack" (meant in the broadest sense possible) is detrimental to gameplay, the game itself, or other players' accounts is irrelevant -- the hack is permitted on GamerzPlanet. Although this has caused problems on two occassions now, with moderators taking it upon themselves to feel the desire to supercede ranking and then proceed to censor hacks, we've stood by our decision; GamerzPlanet does not, and will not, censor hacks.

It's absolute. We've argued to and fro about it, and came to that decision. I'll take an excerpt from Aaron's thread in the staff section of GamerzPlanet, which explains things (almost) concisely.

It's against the nature of our site to prohibit specific hacks from being posted even though that these hacks may cause significant damage to a game. At the same time, GamerzPlanet makes these hacks available for educational purposes and security reasons. You may ask, "Well, Aaron, what do you mean by security reasons?"

One could argue that game masters and developers for these vunerable games require the existence of sites like GamerzPlanet to detect specific problems and patch whatever faults are exposed in their programming. To show an example of this is rather simple. Go to Google.com and you can easily find security sites that actually provide working exploits. Why? This is meant to educate the developers while helping them detect and prevent the problem. Many anti-virus organizations provide "digital signatures" of viruses in order to help companies like McAfee and Symantec upgrade their databases in order to prevent possible damage. Additionally, several sites even provide malicious Javascript code which is similar to the megacount exploit-trojan that has infected the site recently. Many of these sites are, in fact, legal.

Moreover, we are not in an ethical position to choose which hacks to censor and which hacks we choose to keep. Many hacks, that are posted on this site, are inconveniences to people who play these games by the rules. By saying that, a dangerous slippery slope could occur. If one hack isn't suitable for this game, why should we allow this other hack for this other game? The whole management process will be diluted if the staff feels obligated to manage hacks and weigh their opinions on it.

We are not game masters. If you find yourself making decisions that game masters should be making, then what does that say about the game? If a particular game can be exploited with a very destructive ("extreme") hack, then why should people play that game? Let's take Dark Eden for example. Since this game lacks active game masters, wouldn't it be safe to say that maybe you shouldn't be playing this game? Another question to consider is: even if you could censor this hack... are you even really preventing the hack from being released on other sites? The obvious answer to this question is no. You can also ask yourself: would censoring this particular hack prevent the hack from actually being used? The answer to that is, of course, no.

While I sympathize with people who suffer from these hacks, the fault lies on the person who posts the hack and the lack of GM response, not GamerzPlanet. We do not and will not censor hacks. In actuality, the individuals [who posts these hacks] do not break any rules, however if game companies want to seek charges against the individual, we have the legal right to submit their IP address to authorities but this is more of an administrative matter than a general staff manner.

What we provide falls under "proof of concept". If you're deleting things, you're working against the very goal of GamerzPlanet, making you a liability to our site.

I'd just like to reiterate that the very reason GzP exists is because it is a game hacking community. You're more than welcome to argue away in comments.

Recent Downtime.

First and foremost, you have our apologies for the recent downtime of both GamerzPlanet and GzPUpload. Due to a server-compromise, resulting in malicious code being injected into two of the sites running off the GzP server, we had to shut down the site. This was merely a measure to protect you from potentially being infected. The code consisted of an iframe, which then contained a website utilizing a WMF exploit, designed to infect Internet Explorer users and crash Firefox browsers. (See CVE-2005-1790 for detailed information)

Anyway, after a decent amount of downtime, after all of our efforts to rectify the problems basically bottomed-out, the decision was made for the site to be put back online without certain AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) functions. This is more of a temporary fix to prevent infection to the users, until we can completely isolate the problem and then proceed to fix it.

For the time being, GamerzPlanet, GzPArcade and ForumzPlanet are functioning normally (or close to it), and you won't be infected. However, GzPUpload is still affected, and we advise users to stay away from the site unless you have JavaScript disabled.

If you have any suggestions to aid us in our efforts, feel free to contact any of the GamerzPlanet administration.

James(r2k)