Frig looks nice, but I don't like the monthly plans..

I agree, some nice features but I'd rather a one time fee

yeah a script issue here most likely

I don't mind paying a monthly fee for a good service. Bill has to make a living. I pay a monthly fee to Stats Remote and a monthly fee to Phantom Frog. Cost of business. Hell I think it's a pretty inexpensive service quite frankly.
Just imagine if we were "normal" brick and mortar businesses. Our overhead would be huge.
As is, I pay bandwidth and a couple of small services. Paysites' only been up a few months and is already netting me over 30 grand a month and growing by leaps every month. So 55 bucks a month for the premium phantom frog is a small price to pay...especially since it has saved me so much more money than it costs in so many ways.
Bottom line is...I don't mind paying a fee for something that works good for me. :) Especially in a business where the profit margin is so high.

Actually, frog looks like quite an expensive solution compared to what others offer. If you look on the pricing page, bellow the 2 solutions advertised
"Up to 3 domains allowed per subscription. There is a $50 installation fee for each domain. If you have cascaded billing, linux clusters or a total membership base of more than 600 ...Contact us for quote. "

So by that quote, licencing for a bit bigger company would bring the bill quite high. Ofcourse, bigger the company, more money to spend around, but i'm just comparing it to other solutions that would be more affordable.

What's with this almost religious zealotry where you try SO hard to bash
Strongbox, so much that you'd be so completely dishonest as to take that
quote and totally skip the very next sentence? The very next sentence is
the link saying "see GeoIP City Coverage and Accuracy". What I said was
that at the city level, it's wrong up to almost 40% of the time in certain regions.
Some examples from their site, linked as the very next sentence after the one
you quoted:
France 37%
Greece 38%
Italy 36%
Saudi Arabia 46%
Poland 37%
Switzerland 36%

You were obviously staring right at that link since you copied and pasted
the sentence right before it, so are you illiterate or are you dishonest?


Actually if you are able to read any post where I've ever mentioned Frog you'll
see I ALWAYS compliment them. I've included a couple of compliments of
Frog in this thread, saying they are one of two decent, modern systems.
In fact, I said here in this thread that a typical Frog installation will often stop
a compromised password SOONER than Strongbox will. I explained that
this is a difference between Frog and Strongbox - Frog is typically set up to
be stricter, so it stops passwords sooner, at the cost of blocking more legitimate
members. Our philosophy, by comparison, is to make sure we do NOT block
legitimate users, even if that means it takes a few minutes or hours longer
to catch all of the compromised ones. So again, if you've read any thread
where I mention Frog you've heard me compliment them and then give an
accurate comparison, one that they would more than likely agree with the
majority of. So again, did you read but not understand, or did you understand
but choose say something that you knew was not true? Are you illiterate or
are you dishonest?

I have 181 active members right now.
only 18 members are not in the US, 11 of those are in Canada.

Only having a 36% accuracy rate for Saudi Arabia doesnt matter in the least.
I didnt post those stats because they dont matter.

Even if 20% of my members were in these countries were the accuracy is under 40% all that means is that 20% of my members could share locally a little bit and get away with it, much as people anywhere can share a little bit with SB... right?


[quote[
Frog is typically set up to
be stricter, so it stops passwords sooner, at the cost of blocking more legitimate
members. Our philosophy, by comparison, is to make sure we do NOT block
legitimate users, even if that means it takes a few minutes or hours longer
to catch all of the compromised ones. So again, if you've read any thread
where I mention Frog you've heard me compliment them and then give an
accurate comparison, one that they would more than likely agree with the
majority of. [/QUOTE]

If a legitimate customer is sharing their password how are they still legitimate?
As far as I know I have only had one member get blocked when he was on vacation. He recovered his own password instantly and was on his way. He even emailed me later to say that the instant password recovery worked great and that more sites need it.
I would say at least half the passwords automatically recovered are just because they forgot them or lost the email with it because when I look at that user its the same ip from the same location.

I get about 3 passwords recovered in any given 48 hour time frame. This may not be lots, but my member base is still small.
But thats still 45 passwords I dont have to send out manually. I would think my time is worth more then the 55 dollar a month fee. Not to mention if it keeps even 1 member rebilling instead of just canceling then its worth every penny.

I got a little off track there.
You say you dont block as fast just to keep from blocking legitimate members. But if you let in lets say 5 "bad" users befor blocking. Now there are 5 people downloading my content without paying, using my BW, and then what if 1 of them shares it on the torrents or news groups?
Some people seem to think shared content is good for business, but I disagree.
I try and minimize content theft. I do this by keeping as many non legit members out of my members area.


I wasn't going to post this because I didnt know if it made any sense, but... sue me.

ladida, do you own a paysite? Or just making observations? Just curious. :)

I can certainly understand your reasoning there, but it's based on a mistaken
understanding of Frog and also a mistaken understanding of Strongbox.
The big problem with the inaccuracy in the geoip database is not that people
will get away with sharing, which may be true, but that paying members will
be wrongly blocked. For IPs that the database thinks are in France, for
example, the location will be wrong 37% of the time, so of those 45 blocked
members who said you have each month, 37% may have been blocked
because Frog THOUGHT they were logging in from different locations
when in fact all logins were from the same location. For example let's
say you have a member from northern France. He logs in with one IP,
which Frog correctly places in northern France. An hour later, he logs in
with another local IP, but Frog THINKs that IP is from southern France
and blocks him. That, to me, is the big problem caused by the inaccuracy
of the database - it causes legitimate users to be blocked. The folks at Frog
pride themselves on stopping passwords quickly, rather than on avoiding
blocking legitimate users and that's cool. Some webmasters who have
sites that are constantly on password sites may prefer that approach.
It's just not the approach that we think is best.

The misunderstanding of Strongbox implied by your question / comment is
that it assumes that Strongbox considers only geo-ip information. _IF_ Strongbox
considered only geo-ip, it would allow people in the same area to share a
little bit. That's not the case, though. Strongbox considers many other factors
such as which ISP they are using, how many times they've logged in recently,
the type of computer they are using, the type of proxy, if any,
whether or not another IP or computer is CURRENTLY logged in using that
user name, etc. The new version even considers basic bio-metric information
about the actual person on the other side of the screen. So while the
geo-ip indicators ALONE aren't as strict as Frog, which uses that information
almost exclusively, Strongbox can combine many different types of factors
and so quickly catch compromised passwords whether they are shared in
a small geographic area or across the globe. One or more of the several
factors will catch them, as many Strongbox webmasters who have tried to
share his their own user names know. (Though admin usernames get a little
extra latititude, a few times per year we have to explain to webmasters that
no, it's not OK for you and your designer in the office next door to use the
same name, that's why you got yourself blocked.)



They aren't sharing - they are legitimate. It just LOOKS like they are sharing
because the geo-ip database is wrong so often.


I agree that a "I forgot my password" button should be a standard feature
on most sites. It's very handy that CCBill provides that functionality to the
user. I'm not sure what this has to do with automatically sending new
passwords to people who give them out. That's a totally unrelated topic as
far as I can tell.


Probably your time is worth that. Of course, if these are "lost password" cases,
you could just link to the CCBill lost password page and save the $55 / month,
so you're paying for nothing. If these are NOT "lost password" cases, but are
users blocked by Frog, isn't it be better to just not block the paying members in
the first place?

If they weren't shared, Frog blocked 45 people it shouldn't have. If the
member shared it, do you really want to keep giving them new passwords to
share, or do you want to stop them, like Strongbox does? if they were
cracked, wouldn't it be better to encrypt the file so it can't be cracked and
members don't get blocked, the way we do it? I can't think of any scenario
where it's better to block your members and have them request new
passwords than to handle it the way we do. Can you?


That's a good question to think about. Rather than five, the difference would
be closer to one. So the question is, would you rather have one person see
your porn for free, or block one paying member? Indeed you are correct that
many people with large sites credit "shared" content that has their URL on it
with a large portion of their sales. Other webmasters think the opposite - some
being frankly paranoid about shared content. After ten years in this business,
I feel that both sides have a point. I've personally seen member databases
with over 10,000 members where most of those members came to see more
of what they found on the P2P networks. At $30 / month, that's $300,000 per
month of income. If shared content earns me $300,000 / month, I want to
see my content shared everywhere! On the other hand, shared content of
course dilutes the value of porn, so overall more shared content is bad for the
industry. Anyway, so that's the decision each webmaster has to make - would
they rather have one person see the content free, or would they rather block
a paying customer who shouldn't be blocked? How strict or lenient do you
want to be? I don't know that there is a right or wrong answer here.
I guess you have to figure out how much it costs you in advertising to
get each paying member and how much a GB of bandwidth for a freeloader
costs you. Either Frog or Strongbox can be adjusted to your taste, but Frog
defaults to being quite strict. Strongbox defaults to being a bit more lenient,
knowing that all of the different factors we consider will catch any compromised
passwords quickly enough.



I think this post made a lot of sense. You intelligently discussed some
interesting questions. I was under the possibly false impression that your
earlier post was lacking intellectual honesty, but this post made a lot of sense to me.

Hi Folks,

IMHO, and with all due respect---there is an awful lot of mistaken information on this thread. I consider SB and Frog to be friendly competitors---both fine products with very different features. In fact, Ray and I have actually had a spirited, friendly, techie-talk phone chat.

The bottom line?? Why not go to PhantomFrog.com, and download the Frog Free Trial? Then make up your own mind. It installs in less than 5 minutes with a simple HTML tag. If you don't like Frog, you can uninstall it in 2 minutes.

Also, if you have questions or just wanna talk "tech", my phone and ICQ are on the Frog website. I will do my level best to give you straight answers in a clear, concise manner.

Kind regards,
Bill, "Chief Frog", PhantomFrog.com

I use SB and recently had my server hacked. 17 PW were floating around and SB suspended them all within 2 days. If you just look at your report once a day you can easiely spot one or two PW used by illigit users and change the PW manually. I just manually resend 17 PW, manually banned RU, UA, EE & CN and was living happily ever after. Support from SB was superb. Only thing I would like to see is a more easy access to the config file to manually ban countries, IP ranges, etc. Apart from I can just recommend SB to the fullest extent!