I know this is a littlebit off-topic, but I would like to share with you one very bizarre story that happened to me and Avery just now.
Maybe you've heard about the SRDC trading system and about Aman Arif Tahir (OrangeRoshan) who is promoting it. Avery told me about this a couple of days ago. I found out Aman had set up a website for promoting the system.
He is charging $2500 for an SRDC seminar, which is a highly exaggerated price for stuff that's freely available on the internet, but then if someone is going to pay for something that Avery is giving away for free, then why not (Actually, SRDC is very similar to one of Avery's systems/indicators).
In any case, it seemed to me that Aman had put up all the bits and pieces of the various systems and concepts quite well and that his version might be of interest for our kreslik.com members. The system's description is free on his site, so I registered there two days ago and dropped him a line stating that we would be happy if he introduced his version of the system for our members here, too, right at kreslik.com. He responded with something like "let's cooperate in the future".
I don't know exactly, because our accounts (Avery's and mine) were deleted from the site that day for some strange reason and our IPs were banned. I asked OrangeRoshan why were we banned, but got no reply. I guess the reason might have been that Avery had posted his version of SRDC indicator here at kreslik.com, the same day. Who knows. We didn't care.
The next day their site was down, probably as a result of incompetent system administration. I cannot tell for sure, but the sql errors I saw on the pages looked exactly the same as the errors I saw at kreslik.com when I was first making this site work and when I was not competent at it neither But then maybe it really was a hacking attack. In any case, even if it was a hacking attack, that meant the site was not secured properly against it, which is still the fault of the website administrator. Just for info, there's a strong anti-cracking engine implemented behind kreslik.com website.
Then a reply came from Aman (it's a verbatim copy):
From: Aman Arif Tahir [mailto:a.m.a.n.t.a.h.i.r@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 11:07 AM
To: Michal Kreslik
Subject: Re: banned from your forums
Michal,
One of the admin banned you as they know you and therumpledone are together. You Nuking our forum is confirming the banned. I am dissapointed with you and therumpledone's behaviour. We have enough evidence to take the matter to the authority. Im not taking this lightly.
I really think you guys are smarter than this. Playing with fire and messing with THE WRONG people who can be your allied is perhaps is the most foolish thing anyone could do.
OR
On 2/1/07, Michal Kreslik <michal.kreslik@kreslik.com> wrote:
Hello, Aman,
I would just like to know why I was banned from your forum.
Thanks,
Michal Kreslik
I was shocked. The poor guy was thinking that me and Avery have hacked his site )))
Also, I just couldn't believe my eyes this Aman Arif Tahir is threatening us! By the time I received this ridiculously vengeful email, I already knew we were indeed "messing with the wrong people".
Aman started spreading the word that Avery and me brought his site down by a malicious attack. Instantly, the image of me and Avery in those pirate hats came to my mind
My IP being banned, I used a publicly available commercial utility to change my IP and posted an inquiry on his site as to why are we banned from his forums and stating that his accusations of us hacking into their site were false. Guess what: the message got deleted and this happened several times. Maybe someone didn't want to let people know the truth about their web admin being incompetent.
Anyway, I posted this article here just so that there's a record of how the things really happened, who started this nonsensical issue (Aman) and who is lying (Aman).
Indeed, one can tell the degree of forum liberality by the number of articles deleted by the admins. Here on kreslik.com no article was or will ever be deleted unless it contains swear words or excessive solicitation.
But this is not the case for Aman's forum (and some other forums as well). Those are not liberal, but rather despotic.
By the way, if you are reading this, Aman, please go ahead and post your opinion (most preferably along with your "evidence") here. I'm not revengeful as you are and I'm not going to delete your post nor ban you from here. I'm fine and this forum is liberal.
I'm not going to spend any more time on this ridiculous issue. Jeez, I can't believe I have already spent the precious time writing this. But when someone is defaming me or my friends, I act. At least on paper At least by writing an article
On the other hand, let's hope Aman is not gonna fulfill his threats by dropping a bomb on Arizona After all, he is getting ready for a trip here to the United States, soon, as I've heard. So I guess next time I should rather keep myself from "messing with the wrong people", as Aman aptly put it.
What's the morals of this story? Offer a cooperation to a fool and he's gonna make the fool out of you.
Michal