The latest TVF News and Announcements! http://www.theviperfiles.com/forums.html Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:13:52 +0000 30 http://www.theviperfiles.com/favicon.ico http://www.theviperfiles.com/forums.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Steps-recovering-VIP-t143053.html Steps to recovering your VIP:

I am sorry to all VIP's, and expiring VIP's will receive a bonus week added on to their VIP status.

I will be processing all paypal emails I have received since Feb. 20th. This will take a while since there is some 163 emails I must process but I believe it is the best way to go about things.


Alright now to the part where I tell you how to recover your VIP status, it's really not that hard I just need to know a few things so I can go into Paypal, confirm your transaction, and asign you to the proper number of days remaining on your VIP.


You can give these details to me via pm (click)

1) Preferably it would be easier for me if you sent me the email address you use to access paypal. No, not the password, I am not going to access your account, I cannot do so with only your email address, it is merely the easiest way for me to search and find all of your transactions and make proper adjustments where adjustment is due.

Note: You could send me the transaction ID, but using your transaction ID I will locate the paypal email associated to your PayPal and still search for all of your transactions that way. So just the paypal email address would suffice.

2) That is really all the information I need. Please be patient. I will add you to your package as soon as I am able to.


Thank you for your continued support, without you guys, TVF would not have become what it is today. ]]> Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:27:00 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Steps-recovering-VIP-t143053.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Weekends-Downtime-t143051.html This Weekends' Downtime

I want to start off by apologizing for not having a recent backup. To get a backup the site is down for 15 + minutes waiting for me to download it. I hate taking the site down but I guess I just must have to make it a habit to do occasionally.

The reason for the downtime: Our provider was migrating the VPS, and applying a standard citrix xen update, and low and behold it was successful for 2/3 of their nodes and the only node that didn't work anymore was the one we were on. They tried all day with a dozen helpers trying to recover the data but it was only showing 4MB. There should have actually been 1.5TB on the node according to our provider.

They apologized but yeah that's not really helping out a whole lot to be honest. But we received a free month of hosting + a RAM boost, so hopefully our site will run faster.

We are now on a backup from 2/20/10 (only about 18 days old considering the downtime since thurs-frid) (it could have been worse, we've had to revert to worse before). I hope that everyone will re-register and people will re-post their topics/posts!

I dedicated a lot of my weekend to trying to fix this and I thank everyone who has stuck with us through these times

If you have paid for VIP, but don't have your VIP status please see the topic here on how to confirm your VIP: (click)

Thanks especially to them. I state in that above topic that if your VIP is expiring I can compensate with an extra week for you.

Well that's about it for now, thanks everyone.]]> Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:25:37 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Weekends-Downtime-t143051.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/MoTM-Certificate-Contest-t142405.html

This is still with our Third Birthday celebration and I was feeling generous

The following winners will need to PM me a link to the PSD (including any special fonts used!) (rapidshare is fine) to claim your prize! Once the PSD is received I will confirm your VIP status with the corresponding amount of days. If you are currently a VIP i will extend your account by x days when your current VIP runs out.

Here are the results!

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Winner! - 45 days VIP

chuchay


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Runner Up - 30 days VIP

moh33sm

Specifically the first one, but the second one below was nice


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2nd Place - 20 days VIP

bDub

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3rd place - 15 days VIP

Lord Hellfire

and this one was worth mentioning by him as well


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Honorable Mention - 10 Days VIP

JAWZ


======================================

Thanks again everyone, long live TVF ]]> Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:06:04 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/MoTM-Certificate-Contest-t142405.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/MoTM-Certificate-Contest-t135524.html The winner was cody1024d with a guess of 24!

This contest is going to be for you GFX'ers out there. What we need is a new MoTM Certificate. If you don't know what I am talking about, its the certificate we make for our MoTM's every month.

Here is the current one, for kareen2 and February 2010.





Now here are the rules for the game:

• Anyone can join
• A free month of VIP to the winner, (a $10 value!)
• A runner up will receive 15 days of VIP, $5 value
• Knowing that every MoTM will be using your certificate
• *MUST* save PSD so we can edit for each member/month. However, you may not want to post it because it would make it easy for someone to steal your idea, in that case if you enter just make sure to save your PSD on your computer. If you win and you don't have the PSD, you will either have to make it again or the next entry will be chosen.
• Post your example certificate here in this topic.
• Max 3 entries per member.
• Be creative! have fun
• We will later set a deadline for this, expect 1-2 weeks.

Good luck everyone!]]> Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:32:26 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/MoTM-Certificate-Contest-t135524.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Number-Game-Contest-t133551.html

The first member to guess the number right wins! The range is from 1-100!


You can only guess once per day, good luck! You can click here to guess now!


Of course, VIP's are welcome to guess as well


I will screen this topic daily and if someone guesses the right number, I will let everyone know

Edit:

The Winner is cody1024d, and the number was 24! Congrats bud ]]> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:53:37 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Number-Game-Contest-t133551.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Viper-Files-3-Year-Hist-t133020.html This may not have everything in here, but from this you can paint the picture and understand everything you would need to know about us .. Please don't complain if I missed something, I hit on the main topics that I wanted to hit on.


To begin with the history of The Viper Files we would have to go way back about 4 + years ago when Vipersnipes and myself met. We met in a game of halo 2 and at first we didn’t really like each other but we were in the same clan and added each other to each others friends list based on the gamertag likenesses.

We eventually thought it would be cool to create a halo glitching website. We first used Tripod as our initial site. Our original halo site was located at http://h2glitches101.tripod.com which usually redirected to The Viper Files, but for old times sake I am now having show the good ol' website . It was a Halo 2 glitching site and at its peak reached an average of about 1000+ unique hits a day.

Vipersnipes was good at the html, while I was good at finding the content for the site.

After long debate and strong pushing by myself, we added a forum to our site. We used "Proboards" to make the free forum. Forums were my thing from then on.

It was funny we ended up getting around 2000 members however which was quite good… but that was after a year and 1/2 of having the site.
Anyway eventually halo 2 got old and we got xbox 360’s and we eventually wanted to make a Halo 3 site. That never happened however, due to the lack of cool glitches we found in halo 3. Also, unfortunately, proboards does not still have our board on its site.

We bought the domain for the intended Halo 3 website. (halo3scource). Too bad vipersnipes spelled the name of the site wrong. It was suppose to be halo3source.com but I spelled it halo3scource.com. Of course we were letting good server space just go to waste. I have been getting into the whole warez scene and he decided it would be cool if we could create a site that people could download warez from. It was oringally intended for personal and friend use, but it eventually expanded too way beyond that.

We originally just uploaded our files onto our server and our homepage was totally dysfunctional and there was no way of organizing our files. We thought it would be cool to make a forum that we could use for anyone who wanted to post their own files or what not. Thus the forum was created.

I uploaded the forum files and we then began to start the long, time consuming job of getting the site to take off if you will. It was a lot harder setting up the forum than you would think.. I had no idea what i was doing then

We eventually gained more members, and bought the domain TheViperFiles.com. But that only redirected traffic to halo3scource.com/forum. One long night, I found out how to transfer all the files and sql to work on the new domain and changed the settings.. Thus we were officially "The Viper Files."

We steadily grew, and encountered our share of hardships, but survived them all. We have been referenced by many as "The best warez site ever with the best community that actually cares for and helps our members," and a lot of people like our VIP service that provides multiple downloading accounts for a small monthly price.

Now, after a while, Vipersnipes had to work on school and work and his own life, and couldn't manage to keep up with the work on TVF. He was eventually dropped as admin. . We lost contact for a very long time but we do still occasionally play CoD:MW2 together on the Xbox 360. We have beaten all the co-op missions on the hardest difficulty together.

Dr Macinyasha took his place and everything was going fairly well until one day in march-april 2009 where our US based host charged us a high amount of money ($300-600) because Vipersnipes hadn't given us the billing information and was not paying for the server. This prompted them to realize that we are a Warez site and they refused to give us our backups no matter what we said, and even offered money for the hassle to reboot the server and grab the money.

That wouldn't have been a problem, but we were using an automatic backup system and it had not been working correctly. The SQL was corrupt. We were forced to beg and plead with the datacenter. Nothing worked. A month or two passed. Everyone was frustrated. But one Saturday in May I just said f**k it and i pulled the latest working backup we had from October 31, 2009. That essentially made us lose thousands of members and thousands of posts and we had lost our community. There was a lot of rebuilding and the work was too much for Dr M as he had school and a job of his own aswell.

We were going in the right direction finally, but since we still weren't as big as we were we were using shared hosting with a dickhole company. The server that the site was on "crashed" and I had to wait a week and pay $50 for a backup of the site. That would have been fine as I had purchased another hosting plan with a different company, but the backup they gave me for the SQL was the raw SQL. It was very confusing to deal with and no one had ever seen such a thing before. Each table had 3 files that went a long with it, and there is over a hundred tables on the forum so I had over 300 files with mysterious extensions. I remember spending the long June day working on a way to make this backup work, since the old company was no help whatsoever. I was reading and I downloaded a microsoft SQL program and imported all the files, and it took i think two hours to convert it into a .SQL file. I then had to import the SQL 10MB at a time on the new server, which was very tedious and my brain hurt after working on it all day... But we were finally up again. There was about 4-7 days of downtime there.

We have been increasing very steadily since then and pretty much going with I would say 95%-99% up time. But there was a period in September where our hosting company went completely under due to poor management, and they decided to cut their losses and shut off the servers w/o any warning. I waited for 3 days and nothing was happening so I reverted to a 9 day old backup, which wasn't terribly bad I suppose. It could have been worse.

But ever since September of 2009 we have been up I would say 99% of the time and we found a nice stable VPS to run our site on, in the Netherlands.

We are currently inside the 50,000 ranks on Alexa, which is quite nice , also just above 70,000 members.


It just seems surreal to be running TVF for 3 years now come Feb 5, 2010. Never thought this would be such a great community to run!

All this is pretty much a dream come true.. Thanks to everyone! Long live TVF!]]> Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:08:11 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Viper-Files-3-Year-Hist-t133020.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/TVF-Retro-Skin-TVF-s-B-t132110.html


First off, we will be putting up our day 1 retro theme! It is dark, but it is pretty cool If it hurts your eyes, you are free to switch to the other themes on the lower left hand corner.



Happy third TVF

UPDATE! Check out our history topic! http://www.theviperfiles.com/Viper-Files-3...st-t133020.html]]> Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:55:14 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/TVF-Retro-Skin-TVF-s-B-t132110.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Sharecashorg-Banned-t132057.html
Any topic containing this link will be filtered and will be subject to a warning / ban. If you see anyone trying to post sharecash links, please report and/or PM me.

Thanks guys!



P.s., if anyone else knows of sites like these that make you take a stupid "survey" to download, please PM me about it!]]> Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:36:15 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Sharecashorg-Banned-t132057.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/70-000-Members-t130724.html

That is amazing!



Long live TVF!!! ]]> Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:59:19 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/70-000-Members-t130724.html http://www.theviperfiles.com/Member-Month-Februar-t130712.html
This is a very special month for TVF, it is our birthday month!

Everyone congratulate kareen2 to the prestigious TVF Motm club!



Kareen2, you are now the Motm for February ]]> Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:36:19 +0000 http://www.theviperfiles.com/Member-Month-Februar-t130712.html