Anyone else see this on DistroWatch? Gentoo Cheater...

moat · n00b Joined: 05 Nov 2002 Posts: 12

Copied from http:\\www.distrowatch.com
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Ironically, while pouring through log files, we did come across some suspicious activity regarding Gentoo page hits. Upon investigation, it has become clear that an individual from a well-known cartoon domain name has been mickeymousing with the Gentoo counter - repeatedly reloading the counter from various machines on their network at exactly the same mm:ss every hour, 24 hours a day. This generated 240 extra Gentoo hits per day (or around one third of total hits on the Gentoo page).
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-Moat

kompugeek · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Ohio

Yes, I did. It's a shame that someone felt they had to force Gentoo's statistics to boost it's ratings. Gentoo is one of the best distros, if not THE best distro out there. I hope Gentoo's reputation doesn't faulter because of this...
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gilesjuk · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 3:27 am Post subject:

Well someone must have been doing it with YOper as well, that OS does not live up to the hype IMHO.
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kompugeek · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Ohio

Well, he didn't find anything in the logs about number fixing happening with yoper. I agree, Yoper isn't all what it is cracked up to be, and the mods/programmers have a BAD attitude problem IMHO. Before the v1 went public, there were a BUNCH of messages that they deleted because it gave them bad publicity.
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plate · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 7:26 am Post subject:

No need to moan about Yoper, just read the whole article on Distrowatch...

Evangelion

What "Cartoon domain name"? something like dilbert.com?
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drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

TripKnot · Apprentice Joined: 29 May 2002 Posts: 213

Evangelion, you have to read between the lines. Its actually quite clear which cartoon domain the author was hinting at.

taskara · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 3:24 am Post subject:

yeah I did see it.. and it's a damn shame.

it's also dissapointing to think that after you take out those 250 cheated hits per day, that gentoo ranking goes down to 12th place.. just below Lindows.

Still, I'm not surprised to see this sort of thing happening. Hopefully they can clean it up a bit and we may start seeing some more accurate results.

and also.. distrowatch.com seems to be down.. some web hosting company or something..
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plate · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 3:42 am Post subject:

Accurate results of what, exactly? What's so bloody significant about a page hit ranking, for crying out loud? It's a web counter, nothing more, how can anyone be thick enough to assume that this indicates anything besides the frequency of people watching pages on Distrowatch? What on earth does this have to do with user acceptance or popularity of a Linux distribution? You can bring any name to the top of that list by simply placing a link on the homepage of any given distribution pointing to its description page on Distrowatch.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I'm curious... who cares what is on distrowatch?

*boggles at the concept*
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aja · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 6:28 am Post subject:

<hunggghhhh> -(Sound of me trying to care about distrowatch). Sorry, folks. Couldn't do it. Dear God, someone actually put effort into coding a script for DISTROWATCH? <erngh> (Sound of me being incredulous).

Chris Hickman · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 10:35 am Post subject:

Man, why are you guys ragging so much on Distrowatch? It's a great site and the guy who runs it is a really nice guy. The poll shows levels of interest in distros, nothing more, nothing less. Yoper is so big because for a while it was the first and only paid advertiser for the site, so it had a big effin' banner on the top of the page, and it was new, and then when it became number one people saw it was number one, didn't know anything about it, and checked out the page.

Gentoo is low down because there hasn't been a final release in what, over a year? 1.4 final was projected to come out in August 2002! I don't care how many people tell me "blah blah the final doesn't matter because it's just the installer", most non-Gentoo geeks don't want to install beta software...hell, I don't either, Mozilla and Open Office.org are about the only pieces of software I will do this for, not an entire OS. If it doesn't matter then the developers wouldn't call them release candidates, they would call them releases and we would already be to 1.6 with 1.7 on the way (1.2, 1.3, 1.4RC1=1.4, 1.4RC2=1.5, 1.4RC3=1.6).

Chris
MOD EDIT: The following discussion of release numbers has been split off to this thread. --plate

Evangelion · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 12:06 pm Post subject:

Chris Hickman · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2003 8:50 pm Post subject:

My point about the final releases was secondary. It was more of a rant about the fact that anytime I've mentioned that I'm waiting to install Gentoo again until 1.4 final, I get a barrage of "how come? it's fine now" posts. I don't want to argue that right now.

The bigger point is that most people here were so happy when Gentoo went to #3 on distrowatch, and now people are dissing on it because it's going to drop down and pouting about "oh it doesn't mean anything anyway". Tens of thousands view that website every week, and you'd better believe that the top 10 distros get a lot of new users/buyers because of it, hell, I learned of Gentoo from distrowatch.

We always mention the fact about how the Gentoo community is better than Debian's because we support each other. Well, that includes other websites. Distrowatch always posts news about Gentoo milestones and links to favorable reviews our distro. Most of Gentoo's users come from people who found out about it through Slashdot or Distrowatch, I'll bet.

We should support distrowatch and hell, maybe even take up a collection to put our OWN advertisement on the site. The more Gentoo users the better.

Chris

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

plate · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2003 3:23 pm Post subject:

Chris, let me set this straight: Ladislav Bodnar runs a very tight ship, I admire his site and his tenacity to keep up with that flea circus of Linux distributions. He's the only person I know outside of Japan who had not only heard about Momonga Linux (the Kondara successor), but could even state why he waited before listing them (because it hasn't really taken off yet)... But some idiot rigging a page hit ranking because he thinks it would make Gentoo look more important -- you cannot seriously expect even traces of comprehension for this nonsense?

Chris Hickman · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2003 8:44 pm Post subject:

noff · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2003 9:40 pm Post subject:

I would be really surprised if Gentoo was a top5 distro on there. Why? Nothing wrong with Gentoo, it's just its own users don't help it's count. When I was on Redhat I would check the Redhat page every couple of days to see what was in development. With Gentoo that is not needed and they have a very hard time keeping the information up to date enough. So lots of Redhat users check it out but most Gentoo users don't check out Gentoo.

Just a theory.
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nerdbert · l33t Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 981 Location: Berlin

STiAT · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2003 9:28 am Post subject:

I think that the Y!desktop stats are pushed seems to be realistic.

I downloaded Y!desktop just some weeks ago, and had terrible problems getting it running....

i think y!desktop could get great, but there is lot of time needed to get it to the best distro out there.

But i think most of gentoo users are that happy with their system that they don't need to look up for other distros @ distrowatch

I also still use redhat for servers, and use gentoo on my desktop machine.... and i would never change to an other distro again, had to lot of terrible problems with other distros in the desktop part....

STi

srodney · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 25 Location: London

My 2 cents worth of opinion is from my own personal experiences. When my Win ME finally crashed out of sight on my old box and I was looking for a cheap replacement OS, the first website I went to was "Distrowatch".
Here we newbies have a list of every distro in existence with hyperlinks to their websites and download locations. There are also links to every program, utility and library within those distros. Reviews, articles, news of interest about the whole Linux community all on ONE SITE THAT CAN BE ACCESSED WITHOUT CHARGE. Here the user gets impartial advice and allowed to make up their own mind and freely CHOOSE the distro for them.
Choice has always been Linux's and especially Gentoo's byword and Distrowatch exemplifies this IMHO. Without it newbies will have no one-stop location to discover the world of Linux as I did. We should not be attacking the messenger; we should be hunting down the a*£$%&e who for some perverted short term gain has smeared Gentoo's reputation
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huffd · n00b Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 33

If you feel that strongly about the hit count at distrowatch, then you might keep youselves informed by dropping by once a week to see what is new and while you're at it click on the Gentoo link just to be sure everything looks ok. ;-)

Sierra · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2003 Posts: 48

I like distrowatch--I think a lot of people who like Linux like to try out different things, just to learn more--and distrowatch is a good place to go to see what's new on the scene. I don't think the page counts mean all that much--just because I look at the page doesn't mean I use that distro. The pages with articles or some other push toward it are going to get higher hits. I think it's ridiculous that someone would go to the effort to "cheat". What's the point of that?

I also want to say that I really enjoy the Gentoo forums. I think the forums on Gentoo are much more helpful than anything I got off any other distro site (RedHat, Mandrake, Debian). I also think the weekly newsletter is a great idea--gives users a chance to see what's going on in "Gentooland" even when they don't have time to browse the forums.

ReKleSS · n00b Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 17

Where have I heard this kind of thing before... It happens on most gaming servers. Whenever someone's score seems way out of proportion relative to everyone else's, they're accused of cheating - people can't accept that they're crap. Same thing seems to be happening here.
-ReK