Minijuegos - leechers?

[yellowman]

Hi all!

Does anybody know what´s up with this site?

http://www.minijuegos.com

It´s like a spanish(I think) version of Miniclip. Seems to be a lot of games hosted there, that are done by FK members...
Anybody been contacted by them?

I guess there are many of these "leech"-sites, and that you cannot/shouldn´t care about them... But if the people who creates them, make money from them, I can´t help to get a little pissed off about it
But maybe they don´t, maybe it´s just some kid who does it for fun.. who knows..?

Anyway thought I should let you know!

Peace!
/klas

[Squize]

Yeah they're one of the many sites that caused me to shut mine down.

To be fair to the guy there, I wrote him a email explaining that I wasn't happy that he was
a) Leeching
b) Leeching commercial games
and he removed them straight away, really as good as gold ( Although seeking permission first would have been nicer ).

They have a stupid amount of traffic, when they first posted some our games I checked my logs and we were getting about 400-500 hits in any 5 min period.

Our main problem was with Russian sites, where you couldn't even guess where the email link was, and it got to the stage were it was just easier to shut up shop temp. than to try and mail all the sites leeching.
Blogs also cause a lot of leeching, with all the cross linking that goes on.

Squize.

[mrpauly99]

yes this one did the dirty on me too. little buggers. havent had a problem with russians so far but the dutch seem to have latched onto me. ho hum

[nGFX]

most of the time they try to open your stuff in their frameset ...

with a simple javascript you could redirect them to a "leeching steels bandwidth" page ...

a serverside "http-referer" check works wonders, too

<olli/>

ps. log extract: minijuegos: 36812hits for cauldron ...

[Asclepeos]

people are going to steal things no matter what. I just give them a zip tell them to take the swf and host it on their server. As long as my name shows up in the credits of the swf I don't really mind.

[adit_ya_sharma]

this sucks, Dtunnel 3d is also there and Rofl Attack and Heli Attack 2 and list goes on. Hey, once I tried to play one of the flash games offline and it said that I had to be online on there site to play it (Guaranga Girls or something), can anyone tell me how that can be done?

[Frag]

_url displays the URL of the SWF

code:

---

if (_url == "http://www.site.com/file.swf") {

//okay it's on my site

} else {

//get on my site if you want to play

}

---

You may have to put Stage or _root before _url, it's late and I'm too tired too look it up in the AS dictionary.

[DancingOctopus]

Originally posted by Frag
_url displays the URL of the SWF

Unless you have hotlink protection, that doesn't prevent people embeding the swf straight from your server.

It also doesn't mean people can't hack your swf and change the url check or remove it completly. All in all, nothing can fix that.

I've noticed someone has hacked the ROFLattack swf so the scoreboard works on the arcade hack for invision BBS' as a result, the game is now on a ton of different sites.

This doesn't really bother me though. Since the game was created to take the piss out of the whole internet culture thing, it's kind of ironic that internet pop culture picked it up so well. Makes me laffo.

[murraymint]

Be clever with your protection.

It is never in your interest to show messages saying things like "This game has been stolen" etc.

I agree with nGFX, set your PHP script to accept only the link from your site and nowhere else. However, if it comes from somewhere else, don't get pissy, simply use PHP to either redirect to your homepage or add some javascript to pull it out of the frame.

The gameplayer doesn't care if the game is stolen or not, so just make sure they are in the right place when they play it.

These PHP tricks and _url command in Flash will outwit most annoying game sites.

adit_ya_sharma: If you want to stop people playing offline, stick in fscommand("quit",true) in your first frame. This will close your game as soon as anyone tries to open it offline.

To avoid annoying your player though add a variable to Flash from your html page to check it is within a browser. You can do this by adding it to the plugin code in the page e.g:

<param name="movie" value="game.swf?check=online">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<param name="SCALE" value="exactfit">
<embed src="game.swf?check=online"

Now you can add this code to thie first frame of your FLA:

code:

---

if (check eq "" || check eq undefined) {

getURL("http://www.mysite.com","_self");

}

fscommand("quit",true);

---

Doing this will also bring up your homepage if anyone tries to link directly to your swf.

Edit: o.k I know what your thinking. Couldn't they just link to this swf:
www.mysite.com/game.swf?check=online

well, yes they can and it will work, so to stop that you have to use the Stage.scalemode command.

In short if someone links directly to your swf the scalemode will be set to it's default which is "showAll". So, when you embed your swf in your page set the scale mode to "exactFit". Now add this code to your FLA:

code:

---

if (check == "" || check eq undefined || Stage.scaleMode eq "showAll"){

getURL("http://www.mysite.com","_self");

}

fscommand("quit",true);

---

There is now no way anyone can link directly to your swf and suck up your bandwidth.

I have some more ways to stop page theives but I won't go into them right now. FYI I will soon be puttin' up a site with all these hints and tips on.

[murraymint]

o.k, another hint to stop hacking of your code/highscores.

Make a movie clip called "protection" and use it to declare some variables eg:

code:

---

if (_root._url != "http://www.mysite.com");

_root.allowscore="noway";

}else{

_root.allowscore="sure";

}

---

now, this isn't the protection, so don't panic.
use the following code to determine the size of this movieclip as you will need it later:

code:

---

trace(protection.getBytesTotal())

---

Near the point where you submit your score, check the size of the movie clip using getBytesTotal(). If it returns the correct size then allow the player to proceed. If it doesn't match (i.e it has been hacked) don't stop the player from proceeding, but simply fake the score submission. I find the best way to fox a hacker is to confuse them as to where the problem lies. If they believe the score has been submitted they will naturally think the protection occurs at some other point e.g server side.

This isn't fool proof, but nothing is. Hopefully though it will give you some ideas on other ways to protect your game.