[Brad]

Gee, thanks for meeting me halfway. Fine, you don't care about your install count. I do. Many others have clearly stated they do also. You want it insist on seeing us a lesser people for it, have at it and enjoy your day.

Good old text and it's ability to convey the wrong meaning. I'm not going to meet you halfway because I don't agree with your position, but that doesn't mean I see you as less of a person. Infact if I did I wouldn't be taking the time to explain my thoughts like I did.

Honestly why does everyone have to get all pissy when someone speaks their mind? I guess I should I have used a million smilies in my last post or something?

The rest of your reason all seem to fall out from this 'logged in idea'. And since it's incorrect the rest are all incorrect. 'hide url' doesn't work because the use is viewing the site in question. A call home works much more like AJAX. There is no reason or need for the user to login. The information is sent and recorded just fine with nothing but a productid and vbulletin license number which we already know you can tie to an account here - in fact every account here is required to have a license number.

I know what a call home is and I know what AJAX is thank you.

All of that still doesn't change the fact that installs are only accepted from logged in users. If you code the 'call home' in php it doesn't magically solve this problem. You'd still have to prompt for log-in if you wanted it to work everytime. If it doesn't work everytime then it's useless by nature and not worth doing in the first place. Why can't you understand this?

Someone decided to arbitrarily tie receiving update notices to the installed status.

That someone was Chen. The system was put together to allow hack authors to send updates to end users via e-mail. It also allowed end users to track which modifications they were using via the user cp. Number of installs were only shown to give people an idea of how popular a modification was based on the number of people 'tracking' it.

Indeed "Install" probably was the wrong word to use for the image...but at the time everyone understood exactly what it was for and why it was put in place. All hell broke lose when the user title's started begin based on install counts (much later on) and it hasn't stopped since then.

The information is sent and recorded just fine with nothing but a productid and vbulletin license number which we already know you can tie to an account here - in fact every account here is required to have a license number.

You are very very wrong. I won't go into why..but you need to re-think your theory on the backend of this site.

I think I've said everything one can say about this...and I tire of arguing about numbers at 3:45am. Off to bed for me.