I vote for no Install and/or Uninstall buttons, period. I vote for user titles to be completely separated from hack publishing or use, period. (In fact, I think the entire "user title" part of online forum systems is dopey, and only useful to identify staff members.)

I vote for cake... white cake with chocolate icing, with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream on the side, and a cup of strong coffee.

if the hack intrigued you enough to view his code then it desrves an install imo
but at the same time i agree with tgreer i wouldn't use such a system.

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That's a good point Paul. Just because something is downloaded doesn't mean that it's being used. I've downloaded several hacks but after seeing the shoddy way they were designed, I decided it best not to install them.

Another reason why the 'install' figure is pretty much meaningless ;)

Here's my idea of how it should be done:

• Hacks are available for anyone to install at any time.
  
• Whenever someone downloads a hack, a special number is added to their cookie.
  
• This number distinguishes the hack title, version and date it was download.
  
• The 'download' button should be changed to say 'support'.
  
• When the support button is clicked it checks the cookie for the numbers given for that hack.
  
• If it finds yours then a special 'support icon' is placed in your postbit.
  
• Only those with this icon would receive support.

why cookies you are kind of making things unnessarily complicated there.

oh and @Paul M: vBH may do that but the staff don't pm you asking you to release the hack twice just so you get some extra lines in the xml file.

It's the only way to track them. You can't use IP addessses because that wouldn't work in every case.

but i still don't get about the cookie, does a user get that added to their cookie, if they did then you can just add that in a new table i think and then in the code you just go and retrieve the value for that user of that thread. Only problem is you would need 3086996 rows in the table. But there is probably another way to do it like in the hack info use an array of the userids for people who install it then if $post[userid] is in the array you can put in the postbit "Supports this hack".

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It could be either or. Whichever way it's easier to track them, which is probably to use the same cookie.

yeah but if your using that tjhen you are completely dependant on the user never closing his browser. when you close your browser (on ff) it deletes the cookies.

On the subject of whether you should 'install' before you can download... Some download site I once went on sent you an email 24 hours after you downloaded something. In the email was a "now you've tried the app, wanna review it?" form.
That meant people didn't forget to review it if they wanted to, but didn't get asked to as soon as they'd downloaded it which was of course stupid.

Perhaps that's a possiblity of a once a day cron*... "Hey {username}, you downloaded [] hack, if you installed it click this link to say so: ... and if you want to comment on it, this was the original thread: ..."

* As a cron job it would need to check the download was made at least several hours ago, or if it's due to run at 6am and someone downloads at 5:55am...


Just a thought.

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My vB hacks: Site Backup (easily backup your forum files) -- Image Status Checker / Dead Image Finder - 3.5/3.6 -- Stop people mass deleting / editing their posts plugin - 3.6 -- v3arcade reduce scores to keep arcade competitive -- Make guests give a name when posting or replying - 3.0