All of the "Number of Downloads" seem to start at around 2800 for most of the items.

Probably a bug.

That doesnt explain why all of the items are in the 2800 range. I was surprised to find out an item I uploaded just days ago was at the 2800 mark when it was just at the 500 mark yesterday.

They are almost all screwed up, and if you look at the Most Wanted page the highest numbers are also in that same range.

Nope, not a bug AFAIK. That code hasn't been touched in months. Looks like someone did some script downloading, or at least tried to. Not sure if they were successful. If one of you who has the 2800+ downloads has FTP logs of your Free Stuff item, maybe you could help us understand what happened.

rcook, nope - it must be your counters. All of my utilities show 2830 (+- 5) downloads, but Maconverter was somewhere in the 4000 range before.

Something weird happened here last night (Fri night, Sat morning)... after this site loaded, a pop-up box for a site I don't know asked me for user name and password. I clicked the box away, of course. I'm behind a firewall and anti-virus ran earlier in the evening. I wonder if this site got hacked? I'm not used to strange sites asking for my passwords! Carolly

Now that you mentioned it... I didn't get the password box, but some server tried to place an illegal cookie for ".co.uk". This occasionally happens (thankfully iCab knocks it out... :-) and probably there is no connection to the counter hack. Otherwise, it is interesting that all those oddities add up within few hours.

What a bummer! I've only uploaded a couple of items and been excited watching one of them creep above 1500. Now lost track of it. What are the chances of of the correct figures being restored?

There was I, thinking people really liked my Jeans texture :(

Like the person above, I too have seen the strange pop-up asking for my username and password. But I first saw it a few weeks ago, and it only seems to appear when I'm browsing through the older pages of Poser Textures. I've never seen it anywhere else yet, so maybe that would be a good place to start.

I found some minor database corruption and have fixed it. I believe this explains the Freestuff download counters.

Any chance to backup from earlier realistic numbers? All of my tools still show 2830.

Not sure. Can't guarantee anything, but I'll look into it.

If it can't be fixed best thing to to would be set them all back to zero. Not right, but better than they are now.

I looked at my ftp logs and all it could tell me was that it was accessed by renderosity.com. Dave

WAIT!!! You CAN'T reset to zero man!!!!. I spent ages on that texture :-( Here's a better solution. Tomorrow I'm going to upload the female P4 version of my denim texture(currently at the #1 most wanted). You should get some idea from it's download count what the counters should be re-set to. Is that okay with everyone? Stranger Aeons

All I remember was that the strange pop-up box was from brinkster, and they aren't in my favorites. I may not have ever visited them. But if they have several members who have uploaded stuff here? I'm not sure what sort of site they are.... Carolly

"You should get some idea from it's download count what the counters should be re-set to." How will that tell us anything? I had one item over 13,000, been up for about a year, how will your download count tell us what this count was? I suspent all the counts were little CGI files on the server, and they all somehow got pointed to the same file at one point, but they are seperate again. If they are gone and there was no backup (and I bet there wasn't) they might be gone forever. As I said, resetting all to zero it a poor answer, but it is better than what we have now.

You'd think there would be something in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the first place.

The download counts were part of the Freestuff database tables, not "little CGI files on the server". What happened was database file corruption. And yes, there are daily full site backups. The problem is locating exactly when the corruption occured. Those site backup files are quite large and unwieldy to deal with.

did the work experience high school kid do an update without a where id= clause? g oh my, i've done that a lot... and still do... lol

Errr, no. Like I said, it was database file corruption. Kinda like getting a cross-linked file on a FAT file system. The system files that hold the database tables became corrupted at the system level and had to be repaired yesterday.

Don't even mention cross-linked files! ::shudder::

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...................

Just curious. Has any decision been made yet on whether to restore the old values or leave as is?

I am going to work on it tonight. I think I have a solution that will mostly fix it, back like it should be.

If the downloads are reset will they still include what's been downloaded since the problem began?

Yes. And still working on it all. Didn't quite get it finished last night.

The Free Stuff counters have been corrected. The cause of the problem was corruption in the Free Stuff database table. The database table became internally cross-linked, similar to how a DOS FAT file system can have cross-linked files. To correct the counts, I pulled correct info from a nightly backup file before the corruption happened, added that download count to the current count minus 2828, which was the value written to all the Free Stuff items when the table corruption occured. So, the number is now correct, minus the downloads that occured between the nightly backup I used, and the time of the database corruption, only a matter of hours.

heads off to check "Dangerous Curves" counters... heads back Checks them against spreadsheet list of last download notations... Cool, thanks Russ. ;]

whew Didn't count on Bear's spreadsheets. ;)

Heh heh. I couldn't offer anything as a check though because my last tally was a few days before the glitch. And it wouldn't help on other peoples stuff... just close enough that I could look and go, ok.. it's within a few hundred, close enough. ;] I wanted to keep a total from all three sites they're posted for download at.

Sorry Jim. I meant for fixing the count on files uploaded between Aug 02/05. I was unaware that earlier counts had been damaged. Doesn't matter now. New solution is much better than the 'Nuke'Em All' idea. Phew, good work rcook :)