Paul is completely right about the usage we can do of the statistics... exploits and harassment, we all know.

btw, some stats i'd like to see: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=230716

.. people always requested this... a lot of coders are used to let their old versions on the site here because they want the count of downloads... aside of the number of installs, the total of downloads could be very useful... we already have the indication of who downloaded the latest version, so we could add that count like " latest version X downloads, Y installs "... THIS is more instructive than the simple X installs that are related to nothing...

btw, i like stats not because of my ego, but because i want to know if it worth the effort to code extras or to support it. most of my releases are support-less because they do not need support... but some guys want direct interaction with the downloaders to see if they can work with them to add features or something... if you always support one single guy over 10000 downloads, you see the impact of your support as well.

The facility to do this has actually existed for almost three years - as part of the re-write of the install system I did in early 2007, I added a count of downloads that is not reset by uploading a new file. That count is not actually displayed anywhere.

Ive looked at the count tonight and strangely enough, its obviously been abused (or something has gone wacky) in a number of threads - for instance I found a couple of mods that had a count that had hit the maximum of 65,535. In fact Ive increased the field size because of this, even though I dont for one second believe that the mods involved should really have a count anything like that size. Still, I might look at adding it to the display.

people think that the number of download help their Coder rank to raise, or something... i've seen some guys coming on my site telling me "hey, hire me, i'm a popular coder, check at vb.org, my hacks are downloads thousands of times"... but as i'm not a client, i check the hacks and they usually are crap... but clients does not know that... they think that if a coder have a high rank of downloads and installs it mean something... though we see scammers.

anyway, the question is answered... i knew there was something under the hood Paul M, but as we do not see it, we ask, hey... ;)

Merhaps make it unique downloads.

I already know some of the people who've installed my mods as when they post in the thread it says installed. A lot of these people have links to their forums in their sigs. That makes it really easy for me as a developer to go exploit their forums. . . A list which is /only/ viewable by the (co)developer(s) (and maybe by mods/admins) doesn't really provide any better opportunities that there are currently.

A developer who purposefully releases mods with security exploits isn't going to last very long on here. (At least i'd hope not) As a last defence, allow for users to make their mod installs anonymous, so that the list would show say 20 named users and then 4 anonymous ones at the bottom.