Ok so .. do you guys EVER .. check the reports of nulled boards?

I have reported 2 board in the past month and the forums are still there .. also .. I asked if you guys could reply to me and nothing.

I despise nulled forums and I would like it if you guys could do something about this, please.

We certainly do check piracy reports. I'm afraid it's not as simple as just unplugging them and we often have to go through legal processes to take a site down.

Right so .. do you guys not reply? I put my email address in even though it was optional.

I use to report at least one forum per week that I'm pretty sure that's nulled, but I confess that's a little frustrating...

I never saw a board like that 'desappear'...

I've never had them reply. There's not typically any reason for them to have to reply. They have more resources than you in most cases to determine if the board is pirated or not. Like Charles said, it takes time to get such boards actually down. I've reported a lot, and back when I used to check to see the results of the reports, yes, some of them would be shut down. But others take longer. Just report the sites and forget about them.

Will they encrypted IPB? No? Then let such contributions to the claims and complaints. They are angry about illegal IPB, I think they are still angry about encrypted IPB as an honest customer.

If I were to run a nulled version of IPB on a dedicated server then there is really not much that IPB can do about it. The legal expense to try and shut that board down would be immense. It also depends on which country the server is in because the rules are different in most countries.

In most cases IPB calls the hosting company and gets them to shut the forum down but beyond that it starts to get very costly and time consuming. I would not be at all surprised if a good majority of these boards get away with no penalty at all.

In the end the software is only as good as the support and all of us who run a legal version get great support and great value, so I don't think we need to over concern ourselves about piracy because it will always be an issue. All intellectual property has a certain amount of piracy and the most the software make can do is to try and keep it to a minimum.

So enjoy your legal software with full support and don't worry too much about the nulled boards. In the end if they get successful they will consider the option of adding full support because nobody wants old unsecure software versions on a popular site.

That is correct. Here then is the use of nothing when the IPB encrypted.

Matt would have to install a secret operation, where he IPB illicit access and remove or destroy.

i fully agree.

People running nulled boards isnt always a bad thing for a company like IPB. My first experence of IPB was on a nulled board (though at the time i didnt realise ipb was actually free (this was in 1.2 days)). As a result of experencing the board there i purchaced my first IPB licence for my own site, when i became admin of the site i first met ipb on i brought a licence for them too, and a third one for another site i ran, plus blogs and gallery. from the years of experence on ipb i have also converted many other sites to IPB.

All in all as a DIRECT result of me using a nulled board i have purchaced 3 board licence (renewed 3 years (i think) in a row before converting 1 to perpetual and letting the other 2 drop) 1 blog licence for 2 years and a gallery licence for 1 year and at least another 6 licences of people i reccommended (at least 2 of them are still licence holders, (lost contact with the other 4 people)).

Who knows how many people visiting those 9 boards brought a licence because they had positive experences with ipb as a result of those sites....

It would not take long for them to disable the secret weapon, that is the whole purpose of a nulled board. Someone with good php knowledge would just disable the feature and release it as a nulled board. Nothing short of an encrypted source code would work. That however cannot happen because IPB is open source so that valid license holders can modify and install extra pieces of code.

That may not always be the case though. With the components system they have, and with a good hooks system, mod authors may not always need to edit source code. When that happens there's nothing stopping them from encrypting it.

Of course, that's not the best solution (in my opinion) as it makes "copying" certain features (ie. looking at how IP.Board does it, then just recreate it using your own knowledge and such).

I think they should encrypt a low-level file that is needed, but shouldn't ever be modded. In that file, include a way to kill the IP.Board installation if it's nulled

You will always experience piracy, encrypted software or not. It may slow release groups down, but it won't stop them. In the end, popular will be cracked/nulled, regardless of the protection scheme used.

If it gets encrypted, I cancel my license.

Piracy is just something that happens. And like someone above stated, either they end up buying the license, or the site closes one way or another (forcefully, or they fail at forum admin-ing and just close it.)

They are illegal immigrants without Encryption forums can not effectively prevent. With a Encryption but angered many customers of IPB and they change to VBulletin or if the license sale. The damage may be even higher than the IPB by illegal. Therefore VBulletin not encrypted, they know that would be the end of their forums software. Illegal IPB is annoying for customers and for IPS. I see no way but to do something about it without being honest customers a great disadvantage have.

Ah, another piracy/encryption thread, awesome!

Since IPS are taking massive steps towards building/providing modification resources, i think it is pretty safe to say that large-scale encryption (if any at all) isn't on the agenda.

Even if it was, as Michael has pointed out, with a decent hooks system it'd be possible to modify the boards without core source edits.

I certainly wouldn't have a problem with that, and unless i am overlooking something, neither should anyone else.

So why should we really pay for IPB .. when people can get away with nulled forums?

Me, myself would not run a nulled forum but it just seems a bit silly when we are paying for this and other people are not paying so running a nulled forum .. and getting away with it usually by the sounds of it.

Be aware that they received hundreds of piracy reports a week and they look into each one of them. I know that this issue has not been resolved in a timely fashion but, this issue is being dealt with. IPS should take it-slowly & they often have to go through legal processes to take a site down as Charles said before.

However, the process does take time and they(the piracy staff) will investigate and resolve the situation

If you can get away with robbing an ATM machine does that mean you should do it?

And who's to say you can get away with it? I've personally seen hundreds of sites shut down through our piracy department, and I don't even monitor/review/keep track of it. Just in passing observation. Some are simply more difficult than others, and further to that we have to ensure the owner doesn't have a license and give them a chance to make things right. It's just not as easy as people seem to think....as Charles said, we have no magic switch we can use to shut down a site.

This is one of the reasons why I am not a software developer at the present time wanted to be. certainly not if I have to live. as intellectual property is respected and not taken with feet. Look at the top of the music CD. Today, there are CD burner and they can forget music CD. On the Internet, a certain "right-free Zone", they can not date, in order to protect their property. They are forced by the losses Illegal use to accept or developing or not to waive this. I am very frustrated when I see that the Internet software can not earn more money. You must already in the Lige like Microsoft can play if they are not interested in pirated copies.

I would. I know for a fact, in every forum software I have used that there is always something that you MUST modify the source code to make it look the way you want. Unfortunately regardless of the hooks system if I want to change one thing then I expect that I should be able to modify the source code to get it the way I want, not IPB since I have that right because I am a paying customer.

So unless they made everything (and by everything I mean EVERYTHING) magically editable in the ACP I would leave IPB if they encrypted.

Encrypt is only a possibility. IPS can stop the development of IPB, they can not do anything about it. You may then use the software, but what use them?

It doesn't matter what they do. Full encryption (which I highly doubt), just a core file or non. Regardless of the encryption used, it will be nulled.

Can't you just contact the host?

Oh and I would not use a nulled forum I am just saying.

It really ****s me off when I see nulled forums.

Ah Lindy isn't it that time again for me to send you about 50ish or so links in a e-mail?

Pirated forums, pfft. don't worry about them. You want to go after the places where they are distributing IPB, and take down the rapid share, media fire links and then the little script kiddies can't get the latest version of board and poof there forum goes down without even having to DMCA the host. Thats the short of it, hit the distributor, like Pystar and Apple... wait and hit hard.

And as an experiment I did, I had a copy of IP Board and a copy of VBulletin running on a live server... regardless of that fact that I'm a IPS customer and have 8 licensees, I Google and found a "nulled" copy... stuck that up, just a regular installation and then did a VBulletin installation, didn't customize, just left them as they were and waited. So about around 2.5 - 3 weeks I get an e-mail from VBulletin saying blah blah you have a unlicensed copy take down or we blow up your site, was the dilyo of it. And what was funny was I forgot I was even keeping track of how long till one got discovered...

So my point with that was that VB has call backs I guess you can say, and IPB well who knows - user reported? So yea once again we are broadly lacking, and someone ripped something from my site, I used my Gmail e-mailed rapidshare and less then 24 hours later they replied and I checked the link and it was killed. Didn't have to worry about anything else - so why links I reported ages ago still work I don't know?

If vB has a callback then it was not a nulled version. The whole point of a nulled version is to disable a callback.

I do agree with your point to go after the distributors, that should be a number one priority

vB subcontracts their piracy-related stuff to piratereports.com. As far as I know, IPS does everything themselves, which is a big reason behind it.

http://piratereports.com/index.php?page=report

They're listed on the page though.

And we do. What then when the host doesn't do anything about it (as is often the case in countries overseas)?

I read that part too Josh, just didn't fully understand what it means. They're just putting your company on their site out of courtesy?

Physically go to the servers and destroy them.

Support? There are hundreds of places where you can get support/mods/skins for your boards without proving you have an IPB License. I think the problems lie there. If you can put more resources onto IPB Resources, and sort of put people with nulled boards stranded away from all that, then it'll become a huge downside to use a nulled board.

What I get out of that statement is basically the last one in the first paragraph. The one that mentions that even if they are shut down due to piracy, that they may attempt to pirate another forum software as well.

So it's kinda of saying "if we shut them down, they may pirate another forum software and here's the links to turn them in for that software as well".

Would it be possible to require something like inserting the license key, or the client area e-mail and password before you can use the installer?

I know it wouldn't stop nulled boards, but it *would* stop a lot of the people who just distribute the version directly from their client area.

I know, its just that if I didn't find a distributor I wouldn't have gotten a copy up. Now over seas hosting I can agree its a pain, but weakspots everywhere. Also I don't see why it takes so long for RS links to go down with IPS... again I got mine down in less than 24 hours... and I'm no big threatening company lmao

They were like ok its killed, e-mail us with anything else you want down, bam done.

Do you know easy it is to upload the links back though? I mean it takes a couple mins and bam it's up again. I don't know, I think the best way is to make sure these people don't have access to resources like skins, modifications, and 3rd party support. If you do that, you leave them stranded.

IPS also works with the BSA?

http://www.bsa.org/country.aspx?sc_lang=en

Right. They don't reply, because to do so would be a violationg of privacy. Sure, they could reply, but they can't tell you anything other than "got your email" which is pretty pointless.

For the record, all piracy is handled in house. We do not work with any third party companies at all.

And when you have 300 piracy reports, .Ryan, perhaps the ones you submitted just hadn't been seen yet? I mean, sure one of the employees could sit and do nothing but piracy day in and day out - but then who does support, manages sales requests, answers phones, and so on? Time is divided as appropriate. Our paying customers come before any piracy reports, which is how I think it should be.

When you use that form, there's also an option for usage or distribution...I'm assuming they sort out the distribution ones first (correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

I have yet to see an IPB site that uses ONLY the core IP.Board software (other than here). Every IPB site that I have seen has made some sort of addition to enhance the focus of the site content. We all know that many people choose IPB not only because the quality of the software is good but also for the extra modifications that they can add to it. When IPB 3.0 comes out and I update my iPoints, I will be releasing it only at my site and here, these are also the only places where I will offer support for it. I have turned my entire site into an "anti-nulled" board. For members to get access to all the downloads, tutorials and support they have to PM me here (if they are in the customers group) or offer some other sort of "Proof of Ownership". My sales have slumped due to this but also has my support requests. I have about 90% less support questions since I started the verification process. It is more difficult now for pirated board users to get the mods from my site. I know there are many at IZE but like I said, when the 3.0 comes out, that will be the end of that. Oh I am sure that someone will end up posting my updated mods elsewhere but there will be no support for them elsewhere. If every site that offers free mods/skins/services would start this system, they would have much less support questions to answer and I am sure that the pirated world would feel the pinch of not being able to "spice up" their nulled board like they did in the past. The only reason I see for anyone operating an IPB resource site to not do something like this is because they want the few extra $ that they can get from pirated users. I am sure there will be arguments to that but everyone knows it is true. Right now on my site I have 1,017 registered members and only 283 members in the "Verified" group. This is more than 2/3 of the registrations looking for mods/support that can not get to it.

IPS isn't good at piracy, for instance. I'm still get there emails about a pirated bored for a site that I haven't hosted on my servers for almost two months already.