[Horsedick]

Originally Posted by Dr. McKay That could be easily accomplished without a plugin by putting your link into motd.txt. .

I tried that with the link in the motd.txt but it kept playing as in sounds behind those playing in the game - no way for it to stop restarting the videos so got many complaints. There has to be a way to do a one time showing and have the plugin kill the feeds from the MOTD after that first showing.

[Dr. McKay]

Originally Posted by Horsedick I tried that with the link in the motd.txt but it kept playing as in sounds behind those playing in the game - no way for it to stop restarting the videos so got many complaints. There has to be a way to do a one time showing and have the plugin kill the feeds from the MOTD after that first showing.

That's rather easy.

[winterghost]

Originally Posted by Dr. McKay That's rather easy.

could you write the plugin then?

[Dr. McKay]

Originally Posted by winterghost could you write the plugin then?

This is a heavily modified version of Dynamic MOTD. It simply opens about:blank in the MOTD browser (in the background) when the user closes the MOTD panel. Put your MOTD link in motd.txt as normal. This will cause problems if you don't use a link in your motd.txt, but it's pointless otherwise.

[loranger]

Originally Posted by Horsedick There has to be a way to do a one time showing and have the plugin kill the feeds from the MOTD after that first showing.

Your profit will hop around 0.02$ to 0.04$ / day

[Horsedick]

Originally Posted by loranger Your profit will hop around 0.02$ to 0.04$ / day

prob so but any other way just annoys the hell out of players but at least its legit and doesn't piss off players as noted.

[DeathMaster]

Originally Posted by jasonfrog It's a scam. It amounts to theft, as you are scamming money out of advertisers and giving nothing in return.

Just out of curiosity do you see any way to buy ads from this network? I don't and for all we know he could be selling website hits and just needs a way to generate the traffic. He does state to send any and all traffic and this would be a logical explanation.

Originally Posted by Snaggle I don't think he was so much calling the creator a scammer, but this whole concept. You're sending traffic to a site no one will ever see, scamming the advertiser out of their impressions. The creator of this plugin even said in a quote from the website that multiple hits from the same IP are fine "within reason". This goes beyond reason, reason flew out the window when you decided to spam ads every second on your players.

You should post the entire quote:

"Several of our advertisers are willing to pay for more than one visitor per IP per day (within reason), and those that aren't have traffic filtered out as soon as they reach their limit."

They filter the traffic we send them and use whatever they can the rest get redirected to a generic page.

Originally Posted by jasonfrog It might not violate any forum rules, but it does violate statute law, which I believe have much more weight. It's fraud, specifically Click fraud, which is illegal.

You are right, 99% of ad networks have this in their TOS but this network wants all available traffic in any form and has no specific TOS to prohibit this. For it to be legally binding it would need to be posted and easily accessible for users to read.

I have been using the network for the past 11 months and they can clearly see in their logs how often my link is getting hits. I can only assume that if it were against any of their TOS I would have heard from them by now or at the very least had my account terminated.

[friagram]

I think pinion would catch more clicks with bananas than the pot of gold, with tf2 being so popular and all, i mean who wouldn't like some banans?

[jasonfrog]

Originally Posted by asherkin While we understand - and I personally agree with - the complaints listed here, it doesn't appear to violate any terms of service that are published by the advertiser. Things may change, but at this time we'll remove the plugin if contacted by the advertiser or if their ToS change, not due to complaints here - as that would just boil down to censorship.

U.S. Law applies regardless of any companies ToS.

[jasonfrog]

I don't know if some people are just feigning ignorance here.

It seems like the author and a lot of people using this plugin are American, in which case I will refer you to U.S. Federal law

18 U.S.C. § 1343 provides:

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.

From the book titled Crimeware - Online Advertising Fraud published by Symantec Press.

3.1 Impression Spam Impression spam results from HTTP requests for web pages that a user never sees or provide advertisers little or no value for their money. Impression spam affects CPM-based advertising campaigns because advertisers should not be charged for such HTTP requests. Furthermore, impression spam affects click-through-rate (CTR) calculations, as the denominator in the calculation is the number of page views. Since the ranking of ads in an auction may depend upon CPC and CTR, manipulating CTR can be of interest to a malicious advertiser as an indirect method to manipulate the outcome of the ad auction. In addition, click fraudsters may end up increasing the CTRs of ads that they click on, and higher-than-normal CTRs can serve as evidence of a click fraud attack. As such, click fraudsters may conduct impression spam to decrease CTR on ads that they click on in an attempt to avoid detection. Once HTTP requests that are deemed to be impression spam are altered out of a web server log, the number of total page views minus those that are deemed to be impression spam should be used in CTR calculations as well as for CPM counts

From the book The Death of the Internet, from the chapter titled 'How Criminals Profit' section 3.1.3 'Click Fraud'

In each of the revenue models (i.e., impression-based, click-based and action-based) an advertiser who pays for his ads to be included in online content has a positive return on investment (ROI) only when genuine impressions, clicks and actions are generated by legitimate users. ROI is used to express the actual or perceived future value of a marketing campaign and is calculated as the ratio of the revenue gained or lost, relative to the initial investment. An adversary can simulate interest in ads (by creating illegitimate ad impressions, clicks or conversions in the corresponding revenue models) that provides advertisers with little or no ROI, because they are not a result of legitimate users being exposed to ads. We refer to this type of ad fraud as click fraud.