To be honest, if I had known she was hosting on GoDaddy, I would made the suggestion to leave ASAP anyway.  They have a bad track record with this sort of thing, they've even gone beyond the bounds of what they're allowed to do as domain name registrars and have pulled the DNS for sites merely accused of hosting any sort of content they don't like.  There isn't anything good to be said of them in terms of price or service, all they have going for them is name recognition.  :/

It's most likely standard phishing.  The past couple of weeks I've gotten a high volume of that sort of spam.  The funny part of it for me is that it's being sent from a spoofed admin address at my own domain to my various email aliases at my own domain.

I think I know all my identifying information already.  If not, emailing myself ain't gonna work out too well, is it? XD

It is not a fake problem.  If you take one look, for instance, at practically ANY of the sims offered for download at that site, not just the celebrities, you can see that it is an issue because most of them are fucking horrible.  It's a whole bunch of issues as to why that is, including some misled guidelines for the category, but part of it is the lack of criticism, and I do feel bad.  Because people fail to respond to wishes for critique because of the atmosphere on there and creators who actually want to try and improve end up seeing the criticism elsewhere after their stuff has been "approved."  I had a discussion with someone in that position just the other day.  "I put everything on the feedback forum."  "I stopped trying on the feedback forum because no one ever listens."

While I agree that this is not the place to discuss it, gently reminding a person of that fact, especially if they are new works better than throwing a shit-fit like a vulgar three-year-old.  Yes, Paden's reactions were out of line, and so are most of yours.  If you can take such minimal points of criticism and throw a fit about them being bashing, then you are a fucking moron.  My god, can some of you annoy the hell out of me at times.

You don't realize such outright hysterical reactions work against what I thought was our collective purpose, showing that paysites are bad and freesites are good?  Such vehement reactions against the most minimal of statements makes us collectively look like idiots?  Makes us look like we're not bringing anything approaching discretion and reason to our actions?  That it makes us look like reactionaries, making our outrage against some of the paysites' shadier actions, and the abyssmal quality of the items some of them charge for, just the same way we appear to approach everything, irrational and overemotional?  If you water down every mistake to shrieking diatribes, then it makes like we have nothing worth saying here?  Ugh, it's utterly disgusting.

If you keep up with that, seriously, it could become a great resource for many reasons.  Simply having a search like that is dead useful, but also the way it can encourage people who are on the fence about what to do with their website.  If there is a really popular search engine out there for sims sites, and if charging money for content could leave you off of it...you may think twice.

However, a word of warning, if it's not going to be updated frequently and regularly, it will not be useful at all.  Not to bring you down or anything, because it's great work.  You may want to find a few people you trust who can help you keep your whitelist of sites as up-to-date as possible.

People have a right to believe what they will, but that doesn't make their belief any less idiotic.  And I definitely have the right to tell them that.  That's what people fail to understand when they try to be all whiteknight and defensive.

I have noticed over the years that being blunt initially and then broadening the explanation of your position seems to be a hell of a lot more effective than trying to be especially polite and not tread on any toes from the get-go.

That's the sort of behavior that makes me lose all respect for a person.  Not that the going pay thing wouldn't also do that, in this case, but anyone who makes a big deal about leaving some place, going in a huff, etc, etc...I don't really respect that.  If you don't like a site, just stop going.  If you've contributed, it's really not nice to take your toys.  Leave a link to your new digs in your profile and your fans will follow you when they notice you've stopped updating.

The only time I really relax on these sort of views is in the case of a site like TSR or if the original Insim had stayed up after Walt's takeover.  If a site has had really nefarious business come to light, or the entire site changes from the original concept.  Not having gotten into a tiff with a moderator or anything like that--because taking your shit doesn't do anything but hurt the people who liked your stuff.  Doing it without a really really really good reason is just sucky.

I'm pretty sure the author of that post a link to it...either that or visited in response to a link.  I know the author discussed it.  I think it's at least a year old now.  Maybe a year and a half.

Peggy's mapping has always been pretty atrocious.  I retexured/realphaed one of her old pay bobs for a Secret Santa gift last year (yeah, I know there are other bobs out there, but the person had a 1920s themed hood, and I wanted to give her MOAR BOBS that she definitely didn't have before), and it was nearly impossible to give that thing a blunt cut because of how it was mapped.

It ended up looking decent, because it was short and my end goal was easy, but it took a lot of fiddling around.

So I'm not entirely sure that this latest mapping is malicious instead of a result of more Peggy "What gap?" nonlogic.

And while I get what you're saying about editing other hair instead of Peggy's, every hair that exists tends to get the retexture treatment over at GoS these days.  It's less "OMG MUST RETEXTURE PEGGY HAIRS" and more "OMG MUST RETEXTURE ALL HAIRS."

I'm not sure about Pescado's reasoning, but here's mine.  They've shared enough information to portray themselves as horribly incompetant victims.  Letting on that they have unencrypted passwords AND a security breach that they kept secret from their customers is such a bad light to put a supposedly professional business in, I believe it's got to be the best show they could make out of the evidence they knew Delphy had.  Even being utter moronic victims is better than being seen as utter moronic criminals.

If they could have spun it better than that, they would have.  As it is, I think it's a pretty good twist, if they've managed to get people to believe it.

Unfortunately, I'm betting Delphy offered way more information than he should have.  Probably there was more than enough offered here in this thread to get them started on this defense.  You generally do not let the accused participate in their investigations, for good reason!

What has ruled out the explanation that the same person at TSR who accessed Buggybooz and Thomas's accounts at MTS2 just used the same proxy whilst wandering about TSR's completely browseable, unencrypted userfiles?  Like one would put a coat on to go outside if it were cold regardless of the destination, they proxy up before doing shady shit, regardless of what site they're fucking with?

I was gonna say...it shouldn't be too bad to retexture, but alpha-editing is probably never going to happen.  Or at least, I wouldn't be able to wrap my head around it.

I just posted this elsewhere, but here's my take on it, since it shows my reasoning on this whole thing.

The problem with trying to blame someone besides TSR, is that it's becoming increasingly unlikely.

Hijacking people's accounts is not some mystical thing that smart, computer-literate people can magically do. It's very unlikely that these accounts were brute-forced. That just doesn't happen anymore. Password restrictions are strict enough, and sites block IPs for a certain length of time after login attempts. The fact that they got into LJ helps me to think the passwords were known. I said as much when simsecret was hacked, too. So, basically, here are all the alternatives to "someone got ahold of passwords from/via TSR" (and I believe TSR is at fault IF they had a security leak months ago that they never told anyone about OR if someone there is doing all this):

1) Sinthe, Buggybooz, and Thomas are all random morons using something like "password" as their passwords. All these accounts were shown using IPs that trace back to what is probably the same person/computer.  Even if you don't believe that Sinthe's case is the same person and it was someone else coincidentally using the same browser on a similar computer with the same IP masking service, you've still got the other commonality there.

2) Sinthe, Buggybooz, and Thomas are all close enough to the same untrustworthy person that they have given out their account information to them.

3) Sinthe, Buggybooz, and Thomas all fell for a phishing scheme and entered their site information at a malicious third-party site. This requires both Sinthe and Buggybooz to have been active at all at TSR sometime recently, and it means the entire community has been too stupid to notice this.

4) Someone is using a cookie-grabber on a malicious third-party website, and these people all had a TSR cookie with an unhashed password, so TSR is still run by idiots. And Sinthe and Buggybooz would have had to been active on the TSR website pretty recently.

Add in the fact that the only people who knew Buggybooz was even complaining about a stolen item were those at TSR and the FA forum at MTS2, and the timing of the attack on Buggy is ridiculously suspect. It also doesn't strike me as a good way to frame TSR, because it doesn't honestly seem BIG enough.

At best, it seems TSR is a terribly insecure site run by morons that should probably be prosecuted and, at worst, TSR is a terribly malicious site run by morons that should probably be prosecuted. 

If you have a good eye, experience at looking for this sort of thing, and a mediocre photoshop to look at, you can usually tell by some pixel distortion whether or not something has beel altered.

The problem with what Dot is horribly, terribly, nonsensically trying to say is that it's generally the opposite of reality.  If you really wanted to look at a screencap for evidence that things had been altered, you would actually be looking at the space around the words.  To see if things had been erased, cloned over, etc.  Where the "real" text had been removed to make way for the "fake" text.

The only good way to prove this point would be to POINT IT OUT IN A SCREENCAP that has been badly photoshopped.  Making random images with arrows all over the place is just sheer and utter stupidity.

I can't believe I'm "defending" Evi, but it looks like she used a bathing suit alpha instead of actually finding one more suitable for undies.  I don't think they're riding up on purpose...they're just high-cut in a way that isn't that abnormal in a girl's tank suit.  Totally abnormal for underwear, though.  :/

Oh for fuck's sake.

It's called image compression.  That's all it is.

Blurring and slight anti-aliasing easily comes from what I'd consider "normal" levels of .jpg compression to make an image net-friendly.  Turning an image into a .gif removes the chance of artifacting and blur, but it can modify the colors.

I'd say that house is rather large for the number of rooms it has.  If you divided up the floors into more rooms, then it wouldn't seem so overlarge.  I kid you not, with the amount of squares you've dedicated to bathrooms, I could probably make about ten.    Which I do all the time, I play legacy families so I'll end up with 10-12 people in the house, and I want them to all shower if they need to in the morning!  (Okay, depending on the family, it's between four and ten bathrooms, but it's still a lot!)

I do enjoy nice big deck/veranda/patio areas.  I think those pillars would look nicer if they were all the way out by the porch railings.  Hmm...perhaps if the house wasn't quite so symmetrical, either?  I like the jut-out area on the second floor, I might make the first floor match with that.  I'd also suggest moving the driveway closer to the house, just because people don't often park so far away from their house.  It looks like you'd just have room for that second piece against the porch, and then you could maybe combine the driveway and front walk?

...I love building and I can ramble on about a lot forever.