Just my .02

Placing a copyright link on a mod where the majority of the page is generated by that mod is fine IMO. Placing your link (1 link) in the footer of a photo gallery or classified section mod, seems appropriate to me.

However, I don't think copyright links should be placed on pages not substantially generated by that mod. I think it disrespects the work of other mod authors. I also don't think its appropriate to place the link when your mod didn't substantially change the look / function of the page.

If everyone placed a site wide footer link, my footer would be a laundry list.

I think it's not ethical and it's obvious that they do it to increase their seo rank and to get some additional visibility however, I don't have a problem with this and I think it's legal and up to them.
On the side note I don't like their mods mostly because of the low code quality. They are doing everything with only money in mind. They are UK based company that based their business on fulfilling the vbulletin mods niche by using cheap outsourced coders from third world countries.

Eh?

All of our coders are either US or UK based. I'm not sure where you live that the UK and US are third world countries, but tell me so I can move there immediately!

Iain

Naturally in this instance it would be prudent for DBTech to grant Christos the use of his disabling code (so allowing his mod pages NOT to show the DBTech copyright) to his installed version of DBTechs' Copyright Manager.

@DBTech, why not just build in an option in settings to add custom pages..etc to be exempt, you can always double check to see if the user is trying to exempt the copyright from standard vb pages, shouldn't be too hard and then everyone will be happy :)

Checking 10,000+ sites would be kinda tricky! xD

We'll look into ways to try to make the mods more selective and only affect vB pages where possible, but no promises :)

If it comes down to it we'll kinda have to take the "big evil business" approach and put our own needs ahead of the wants of the coders who would rather the copyright wasn't on their generated pages.

If it's possible to change it up without it being a major operation that will cost us time/money I'll try to take that route, though :)

Iain

This would require an end user to add the exempt pages to their DBTech install. Without the end user doing that, the copyright would still appear on other mod's pages.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what DBTech is trying to do. That's clean up the footer of all the individual copyrights.

The absolutely easiest way is to check if the script is a standard vB script or a full DBTech script and exclude the copyright from all pages generated by scripts that aren't in that list. Just put all the script names in an array and check if THIS_SCRIPT is in that array or not.

--------------- Added [DATE]1370636222[/DATE] at [TIME]1370636222[/TIME] ---------------

As a totally, completely off topic comment to DBTech...

You might want to switch to curl for what you're doing. allow_url_fopen is a system level only setting and can't be changed with ini_set by a script.

We're discussing it, and the biggest issue with that is it means making a huge list that has to be updated every time we release a new mod (which is roughly every few weeks). Then we would have to edit/re-upload all of our mods using global footers. Every few weeks.

Plus we would need to ask users to come download and install those updates every few weeks.

We would be significantly inconveniencing ourselves and our users/customers to pull this off, in other words.

There's also the argument to be made that many of our mods DO run on pages generated by other mods, some visibly and some in the background, and by taking this approach we would be removing copyright giving users actual correct info.

For instance our Navtabs mod would run on any page with a navbar. Our profile hover mod on any page with linked usernames, etc. There are many other examples, too. By blanket excluding all non-default pages, we would be removing the copyright of those mods despite them potentially being on that page.

Iain

That's what I deducted after speaking with you on your site a while ago but I might be wrong. I cannot know that for sure and I cannot know the percentage of such code there, bugged and poor code can be written by really anyone. It just happens today that most of such code pieces come from India, Pakistan etc and it also doesn't mean there are no any good coders there, it's just ...there are dozens of "coders" there or guys who try to be "coders" and most of them is low quality ones. But speaking of the code, it's really poor and not extensible. Also whenever I asked you if something could be implemented you said it either can't be done or that you will check with your coder and nothing after then ever happened.

Iain,

If the navtabs were installed on my test server, I'd have no problem with the navtab copyright appearing on my mods pages. But in the example I gave, neither the post thanks or slider mods are present on that page.

The general disagreement is mainly caused by the global copyright managment mod you recently released. And would be the most difficult to manage.

Other mods, individually it's simple to restrict where the copyright is seen. Forgive any mistakes below..

For example

The slider would on on the forumhome and I believe the CMS page.
Post thanks on showthread and showpost (plus any other places it's used)
Navtabs - yes.. everywhere that navtabs can be displayed.

Can you PM me some examples of that happening? Often feature requests will be marked as "under consideration" and then a decision will be made on them when the mod is being updated. We can't add every request to every mod, especially if it's very specific to one persons site, or will be a large amount of work that very few people are asking for/will use :)

There aren't dozens of coders at DBTech - at the moment there are 6. There have never been more than about 8 at once, and every one of them without exception has been from the UK (or ireland) or the US. Absolutely 0% of our code is outsourced, it is all done in-house by one of those coders.

Iain

You need to check your sources, there is 1 coder on the DBT team that is from the UK, the rest are in the USA.

What posts did you request features to be added on their site?

I don't mean checking all the sites I mean have your local script check locally and disallow exemption of both yours and standard vb pages :)

Business is only evil if you let it be :)

Nice to here your looking at it, and in the meantime for Christos, could he adjust your local script on his server or installation to exclude his pages?

*nods* so the tricky thing here becomes what if someone using the Copyright Management mod is using a global mod that shows up everywhere, for instance.

Basically the amount of micromanagement that would take across our entire spectrum of mods, all of the scripts that would have to be made, everything that would have to be either included or excluded...

However it pans out, it's going to be a large amount of work somewhere, and it's not work that's going to benefit any of our users/customers in any way, or us. It's hard to justify that kind of outlay, really.

If there was a simple easy solution I'd jump all over it, but so much extra work and micromanagement for the sake of a few coders who would rather our copyright not appear on their pages isn't a burden I could really justify the business taken on.

It sucks to have to be "that guy" who puts the interests of the company & employees and our users & customers ahead of those of other coders but every now and it's something that has to be done, however nice it would be if there was an alternative :(

Iain

Really do you count them mods??..... They're toys my dear and nothing more. Mods are your Quizz, your Credits, your Gallery etc etc. Those ones that are getting a full page to work. All others that you mentioned are toys. Useful to some users, I admit it. But toys. You can't count them as mods that deserve to have a copyright notice.

I won't really tell you who I am if that is what you're trying to find out. I'm just one of your customers. Does it really matter which one? I just asked a few times some things and not to implement them, I just asked if they can be done at all because I could not figure them out myself and I had a feeling that they would need recoding some bits from scratch.
Why I am telling this? I am not telling this to accuse you of the lack of the support. I am telling this to express my feeling which was like: "these mods are either really not extensible and nothing more can be done with them or they (you) don't know/can't do anything without their original mod coder".

I don't care which customer you are, just cite your sources, where did you get a response from a third world country coder on their site?

I made a couple of posts explaining why that would be unworkable/unpractical.

As far as I know there's no real way for that to be accomplished. In theory if he wanted to code something so that on his personal site our copyright didn't show up on pages his mods generated, with no DBTech products on it, i'd be fine with that.

In practice posts like the one below where he essentially claims things aren't "mods" when they don't fit in with his agenda mean it's unlikely that would be done in a reasonable way.

We can, and we do.

I can't really check into what you're saying, then. I'm not sure what the issue is with us knowing who you are? =/

Anyway, I can't check into your claims without some details so for now i'll just have to say I have absolutely no knowledge of what you're claiming ever actually happening - you seem to have been under the mistaken impression we're also a company that outsources coding so you might have us mixed up with someone else :)

Iain

--------------- Added [DATE]1370638097[/DATE] at [TIME]1370638097[/TIME] ---------------

Thanks, I wasn't actually aware that it was a system-level only setting :)

I've switched it to cURL in my dev environment and I'll implement it in the next version of the mod :)


Fillip

I don't mean this to be cruel in any way, but..

It's this type of thing where I can say you don't know how many people have paid me to make DBTech mods work universally with every other mod on their site (sometimes my mods, more often mods from other people). I know of at least 5 owners that swear they will never purchase another DBTech mod because of this.

The DBTech way may not always the correct or best way.

We always go out of our way to make our mods compatible with other peoples mods - we have an open offer to any coder who's work is incompatible with ours to grab a free pro license to check into it.

I agree the DBTech way might not always be the correct or best way, but it's the way that's allowed us to remain in business and successful where basically all of our competitors have failed.

Well then kudos to you, I have seen on their site, if it was requested, they go out of their way to ensure their mods work with any others.

I was totally unaware of the offer for a pro license from you. I just might take you up on that offer for the post thanks mod that just doesn't play well with a current mod of mine. Or the other way around if you like. ;)

Might I suggest that the Copyright Managment mod perform it's global_bootstrap_init_complete funtion later than 1. That way a coder could grab the options copyrighttext before the mod changes it. And then on any mod's pages the copyright text can be returned to it's default value.

Sure, hit Fillip up with a PM on DBTech (@Belazor) and he'll get you what you need. If you let him know what the issue is, he'll see if he can work out what's causing it as well.

Iain

This is kind of embarrassing because i really should think before I post, but: FWIW I think I have to go back a bit on what i said before. While I can understand that mod developers aren't happy to create a mod with custom pages and have someone else's links at the bottom, I can also see that adding to the standard footer isn't that unreasonable, and one could argue that another mod doesn't have to use that footer, or could modify the links if they wanted. So I don't know if I was right in saying that I thought dbtech should do something about it - I don't know what's right.

Also, I don't know about the "links only on pages that are affected" thing, because sometimes that's not really practical.

Maybe if someone can figure out a scheme people can agree on, someone could develop it and everyone could use it voluntarily.

If I recall it well it was just an Indian sounding name of one of your coders. I don't recall if it was post or pm. The other thing is poor code as I described before. That's all.
I don't claim anything so lets stop this subject. Maybe you're all 6 in-house the UK based coders. I can't know. OK? :)


I appreciate you want to help me(?) however, it really doesn't matter to me now because I'm no longer using your mod. I employed a coder to code a similar one for me with all the features I wanted. And I am not claiming anything I'm just expressing my opinion. We live in the free world and everyone has a right to it, am I right? :)
And no, I do not mistaken your company with someone else.

And to sum it all up I think it's cool what you do, it's cool that there is a company dedicated to create extensions for this excellent community platform, it would be much cooler though if you were doing it right.

Will do!

I'm almost certain it was Fillip that used my dev server to do some testing of a DBTech vB5 mod for a *Nix problem way back before vB5 was released.

Well the "poor code" thing is what i'm trying to get to the bottom of, that's why I would appreciate some links etc so I can check into it. That's not an accusation we tend to receive, you see.

For anyone who is interested and/or are as confused as I am about the apparent indian member of our team, our coders names (past and present) are: Fillip, Dylan, Chris, Matt, Brad, John, Jon and David.

I would be especially interested if you could forward me the PM from this Indian-named person claiming to be part of our team, it's something I would like to look into with some urgency for obvious reasons.

Oh dear! I've already said I can't know for sure! So there is no accusation but speculation here. That is the difference.
I won't log now to your forum to forward it to you so you can snap my details because I feel nothing good would really came from this.

Speaking of "the code is poor" - this is an personal opinion, judgment after working with your code and editing the source. It was chaotic, it was heavily impacting the server performance it had some bugs and it was hard to do anything with it in the form it was. That is just my personal opinion about 2 of your mods (2 bigger ones) I've not really gone through the tons of the other mods you have there.

@ALL
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There are no 1st level and 3nd level countries. There are just countries wher humans are living. Being someone in USA or in UK dosen't means that he is 1st level people, on the same way that being someone Greek doesn't means that he is wise or philosopher. I ve met great coders based in China as I also met great coders based in USA, in Canada in Germany. Country has nothing to do with the quality of the code.

Yup, I explained that above. Sure there can be found high quality coders in India too, and low quality coders can be found really anywhere. But I think everyone knows what I meant by this generalization. Perhaps I shouldn't use such statement and generalize. But when I think of low quality code and low quality IT services in general I see an army of Indian people in my mind. With no offense to Indian people. I knew a few really nice and smart Indians. :)

No problem... He wants to add it globaly. Let him add it. But SPECIFIC text and easily recognized. Not "Site is powered by vBullletin Mods & Addons by DBT" which means that every mod on that site is their work. And don't tell me anybody that there is the link "Details" at the end, because you know that nobody clicks the links. What it stays in memory is what the eye have seen.
So, specific text "Quizz by DBT, or Gallery by DBT". But never "Site is powered by DBT".

Users have the option of displaying the mods individually linked in the footer condensed to one line (as much as possible) instead of the "site powered by..." text :)

Feel free to request people who use your mods use THAT setting instead of the "Site powerered by..." setting, i'm sure your users will be more than happy to accommodate you :)

The half "kick" was for you ...lol... The other half was for Iain because I was expecting from him a reply "What bad have the 3nd level countries" and not "We are 1 in UK and 6 in USA", even in case that is true.

--------------- Added [DATE]1370641716[/DATE] at [TIME]1370641716[/TIME] ---------------

I'm glad seeing that the counter for the 2nd choice in poll is growing while the 3nd left only with DBT's vote. I believe that day by day when ther other coders will get the real meaning of this discussion and start participating to it, DBT will change mind. Because currently is talking to us like talking not to coders but to novice PC users. How you succeeded to make that 4 lines of code difficult work it's something that only in marketing seminars you can learn.

But people rarely care and listen to such requests. People just press install and forget about it. And with your dozens of mods and a few mods of Chris the chance your favored option will stay there turned on by default is bigger.

So it's like: "Ask them and maybe 1 within 100 will do it if you will be lucky hahaha".

Actually our preferred option is all of the mods listed in the footer as well, it gives us much more visibility :) It's the users who prefer the "site powered by" text. That's why it's in there.

Christos, neither the DBTech account, nor any of our coders accounts, have voted for option 3.

This isn't the first time in this thread you have invented something that is completely untrue to try to make us look bad.

Please stop it, you're better than that and it's unbecoming of you.

Iain

Please can you talk like a coder and not like a salesman. Yes I know that users have this choice. I tried it. And with just 3 mods the 1 line copyright became 2 lines copyright. So, even if the user tries it, will return to "Site is powered...". And offcourse the user does not cares for me.
So Mr Salesman. Do you know what are you talking about? You're telling me that if I add code that will destroys your server and have the user decide if he clicks the "Fire" or not, who is the guilty? The user? or me?
PS- Hope that you understand that is just an example.

--------------- Added [DATE]1370642273[/DATE] at [TIME]1370642273[/TIME] ---------------

Well its already 1:00am for me so I need to sleep. Goodnight or Goodday to all.

And a user who has a choice to chose between his forum footer stuffed with dozen of links and 1 link what will chose?
It seems logical what he/she will chose. And perhaps other mods authors have no time to monitor if their links are there or not.
You're trying to defeat your business which is obviously wrong to everyone.

We're trying to provide the best possible service to the users. That's it. If we were purely trying to do what's best for us the condensed option wouldn't be in there, because it's less effective for us. :)

Sh*t, in that case I'm going to buy an automatic high-caliber riffle tomorrow and shoot all the rats in my shop, I don't care the bullets will go through the walls and kill all my competitors around because that's what is best possible service to my users. :)

Cool. The cops might care though, better get an alibi in order!

You still do not understand or you don't want to understand or you don't want to admit that you understand you are wrong.