I couldn't find a pic of the collection in 1.0.2.19 but i found one from the former version. I believe in the next version they added the list/icon mode.

Most interesting topic.
I have had a VGirl account since March 2008, however as you can see from my stats I didn't partake much in the forums until recently. I would read some but didn't post.
Reading through this history and seeing the old screen shots I do remember such things as MP3 girl and the old old original VG 1. I didn't use the paid content just the free trailers. I can confirm the images were small but we have to remember this was the 90's when a zip bang computer had 20 to 40 gig drive space. I can remember paying $250 for my first 120gig Hdrive (ouch).

For something the kids can laugh about my first IBM based comp did not have a hard drive weighed about 80 pounds and only ran DOS based stuff ($2100 at the time 1982). If you have to ask what DOS is you probably wont ever know :)

Additional - I just made myself feel real old.....

Malfunctions, bugs and MEGA-bugs.

Ah, yes, nothing ***** better the enthusiasm of a fan than an unhealthy dose of obscure tech issues or the erratic behaviour of the "vehicles" that bring the girls to strip on our desktops.

Despite the number of threads opened in the problems, bugs and fixes forum, there are actually few recurring issues, being the most common those related to servers and downloading, billing and installing, and mostly particular and minior issues of any kind with the website and the software.

Even though some troubles seems to linger, the product itself is, for the most part, pretty stable and the fixes usually come relatively quickly. Usually...

Then, sometimes the problem or the glitch is so big and affect so many people, and the company itself, that the turmoil occupies the front page of the forums for a while and sometimes end up generating major changes that transform "the way it was".

Here a short compendium of those days of tribulations. Of course it might be more cases than the ones that will be narrated, but seems to me the most significative. Tech issues are kinda boring, but i'll try to make it as lighter as possible to read.

Patience, posting this gonna take some time... ;)

Spam is not just canned meat.

There was a little crisis back there on january, 2008, related to a massive amount of spam the users were getting. There were a few conspiracy theories too.

On January 20, 2008, the user karpos started the thread "possible hack of Totem servers?", reporting, in his own words, a "dramatic spike in spam emails sent to the account that I gave Totem as my email account, on the order of about 50 messages a day increase. I am wondering if part of the problem last week was that someone hacked the VGHD server and stole personal information from it?" Many users started to ***** about the trash they were getting in their e-mails accounts.

Conspiracy theory # 1: Totem sold the e-mail addresses to a third party.

Totem, on January 21, 2008: "As stated in our privacy policy, we never resell, trade, lease or rent any personal information on our users and/or customers. This realy looks like someone had access to our databases and we're investigating on it.It would help if you guys could post here the first day you started receiving that spam, and if you also could post here a few of them so we can investigate on who is making money out of it.

We're sorry about that situation, for thoses of you who have been with us for years, you know this so no us, be assured we're working on solving this asap."

And latter...

Totem, on February 18, 2008: "I also saw a post about us selling the email adresses of our clients and I wanted to point out that it does not make any sense. Let appart the fact people trust us or not. We don't have the email adresses of the free users, so we're only talking of the paying customers here. We had less than 50,000 paying customers so far, the value of that email list would be ranging from $5 to $50. I don't know about you, but risking your business for $50 (and even if it would be $500) does not make sense."

Conpiracy Theory # 2: The third party billing company did it. Epoch, to be precisely.

Totem, on January 22, 2008: "...To respond to an earlir post, epoch does not sell or rent information about their clients at all, this would ***** them so bad."

Continue...

Epoch proved to be innocent. So, an intruder indeed found his way into the servers. Here the investigations recap (all posts by Rex):

On January 21, 2008: "I would need you guys to post the links they use in their emails, so I can contact their sponsors and see who they are..."

On January 21, 2008: "I contacted the websites they are promoting to have their accounts investigated and we're still looking to find out how they got in."

On January 21, 2008: "We're working on our own servers to understand how a leak happen and as well with the third pary billing companies we use to check if they had a leak on their side. If you've been spammed, could you please post here which processor (third party billing company) you used to join? Thnks"

On January 22, 2008: "Ok, we're still working on this, we added a few emails to our database to see if we're also geting spam on theses (that would help to understand where the leak came from). We also had theses guys accounts shut down with the programs they were promoting."

On January 22, 2008: "It's obviously the same person spaming everyone as it always use the same technique. Sending the visitor to a website and then redirecting after adding its affiliation code..."

Continue...

On February 11, 2008, in the thread "Totem's apologies", By Rex, the incident came to an end and all was revealed:

"We have detected and neutralized a script hidden on our servers that a 3rd party has been using to retrieve informations from our databases.

Seems the script had been there for years, probably copied during a security breach before 2007.

The 3rd party has been gathering the email adresses of our clients for a few months, hence the spam ***** and threads in the forum.

Only names and email adresses have been leaked, we don't store any payment informations (as credit card numbers or check numbers) on our servers.

In the last 24 hours we have made numerous significant behind-the-scenes changes to improve internal security to prevent a handful of possible exploits.

We sincerely apologize to all our clients for this situation and want to assure you that protecting the security and privacy of your information is a top priority for us."

And, to my knowledge, that never happened again. Good police work, by the way.

All dressed up and nowhere to go.

Actually, in this case applies something more in the way of "all full stocked, but with nothing to spend on". This tale is not so much about a bug or malfuction, but a weakness in the system. And as everybody knows, a weakness will always be exploited.

There was a time when up to eight cards were released each week. Also, the subscription guaranteed a new girl delivered each day to you. There was a calendar system that offered you every girl on it as a one ticket special. Cool, hu?

Not that much. The combination proved to be disruptive.

The main issue was with the calendar (the calendar was exemplified in the page two of this thread and above). You were able to see the next 7 cards that would be available as specials. Those yet to come trailers were also one ticket specials.

No problem yet, but those with a subscription started to get cards with tickets. The incoming cards were immediately replaced by others not in the users collection, allowing to buy all the cards available for one ticket each. As long as Totem released 7-8 cards each week, there was no much hassle, but the run wasn't gonna last forever. When the production slowed down, all hell was raised.

There were no more cards for those subscribed, so the "a girl each day" was impossible to fulfil for the company. In order to compensate for that, Totem gave one free ticket for each girl not delivered on a daily basis.

Pretty soon, people had a bunch of tickets stored, but nothing to buy with those. Don't need to say that the ***** was plenty and colorful.

On June 09, 2008, on the "3 New cards!" post, by dgedge, the following announcement was made:

"We released over 300 Virtuagirl since the official launch at the begining of the year and now feel we should start focusing even more on quality. We decided to release only 3 new girls this Monday, slowing down our production to be able to be more selective about the future girls.

Have a look at Morgane featured in the All About Girls category
on the forum, she is a good exemple of where we're going.

I also know some of you subscribed and then bought everything there is
already on top of that. Our system gives you a refund of one ticket
when there are no more girls in stock to be delivered and we're working
on new things for you to use your tickets on."

Hum, if Morgane's Type was the destination they were heading, i guess they did a wrong turn and ended up in Flat Chest Village, Czech Republic. But i'm diverging...

Continue...

Latter, on June 10, 2008, posted by Rex:

"When we released VGHD, we did not forseight that some of you would buy six month subscription and then buy enough tickets to buy all the girls at once, "pushing" us to release a new girl every day. This has not been a problem till now because we wanted to pass the 300 cards available as quick as possible and releasing 7 new cards a week has been a real performance from the team here for over 6 months in a row now. There is no way we can maintain that rate of production and it does not make much sense as most of the girls we are casting now are looking pretty close to an existing one. What's the point of having 50 more girls in the 8.50 to 9.00 range? I believe there is no limit to what dedicated members are asking, we could have 3000 girls, they would still ask for 10 new ones a week. We decided to focus on diversity and quality, to spend 2 to 10 times as much for one girl and add girls that are way above what we have now. I know that's ***** for dedicated fans who already bought everything there was to buy and subscribed on top of that, so we're really willing to find a solution there. Re-processing girls from VG2/SS2 and make them available for platinums at a low price has been discussed but the team was not really looking forward working on stuff from the past. We changed outfit auctions so everything can now be bought with tickets and we're open to all ideas. Worse comes to worse we'll refund the remaining subscriptions but I strongly believe there is still other ways and I'd like you to discuss more about it here. We do not plan to release 3 girls a week but rather to release girls here and there as soon as we have some ready."

"We've also been working on changing the subscription model (for new users that is) so people can't subscribe for girls that have not been produced yet because we don't know if we'll be able to deliver them."

Continue...

Lot of questioning and complainig followed to that, so the very next day, on June 11, 2008, Rex posted this:

"Just to clarify again. This only affects members who bought all the 330+ cards with tickets AND are subscribed members because they depend on the very new girls released each week. We compensate them with a ticket each time we can't deliver a girl, but the problem is what to do once you have a bunch of tickets and not so much new girls to buy...

I mention before the possibility of refund, also re-releasing VG2/SS2 girls, we also thought of publishing rare (and more expensive) cards for collectors only, we put up auctions for outfits, are working on signed pictures of the girls and are open to any suggestions.

About the "quality", we want to be able to spend more on filming. Being props or girl's price. We're going after more popular girls but it does not really mean American porn stars with big plastic tits (could be a few, but it's not where we're going). Here is another list we're working on:

Jayden James, Shyla Stylez, Hannah Hilton , Priya Rai, Gianna Michaels, Ashlynn Brooke, Memphis Monroe, Sara Jay, Eva Angelina, Audrey Bitoni, Amy Reid, Rachel Roxxx, Carmella Bing, Ava Devine, Savannah Gold, Krystal Steal, Nikki Benz, Jenna Haze, Jenna Jameson, Lisa *****, Puma Swede, Phoenix Marie, Lichelle Marie, Rachel Starr, Abbey Brooks, Sarah Vandella, Cody Lane, Lanny Barbie, Shawna Lenee, Bree Olson, Sienna West, Lacey Duvalle, Briana Banks, Daisy Dukes, Eve Lawrence, Kristal Summers, Sara Stone, Raven Riley, Mariah Milano, Hunter Bryce, Catalina Cruz, Alexis Texas, Brandy Taylor, Riley Evans, Kayden Kross, Olivia O'lovely, Claire Dames, Aria Valentino, Tory Lane.

Deal with Aria and Jenna Jameson is almost done for this summer, seeing Raven Riley in Vegas in July...

We have over a hundred cards that are waiting on hard drives to be processed. We're digging in them each week, selecting girls that had good notations and good review and mixing them with the newest ones from the studio. Some of them might never do it (unless everyone asks for the remaining cards of Jennifer Galbina...), but most of them will and you should see more of us "filling gaps"."

Uh, i'll pass on the Jennifer Galvina's, but how comes that none of those listed chicks, but Rachel Roxxx, are stripping on my desktop right now?

Ah, yeah, that L.A. studio thing...

Continue...

Anyway, some months latter there was an actual bug, that delivered free tickets to the subscribers in adition to the cards released. Yup, they got their weekly cards and tickets on top of that. Bad to the business, man, but there was also a Mega-Bug by far worst in those days, as you can see on this announcement made on November 19, 2008:

"We had a bug in our system since last August that was adding too many free tickets to your accounts when compensating for duplicate girls. They way it works is if you're a recuring member and we don't have enough girls left to deliver you a new girl any given day (if you have all the girls for exemple) we give you one free ticket instead.

This bug gave too many free tickets to over 10.000 of you, some accounts went up to 1000 tickets, lots of them are in the 300 range. Some people found out that this bug was occuring each time you logged and unlogged from our servers and spend days and days doing just that to get free tickets.

We ran a script yesterday that removed all the tickets awarded by mistake. We did not remove from the accounts the girls that have been bought with bogus free tickets. After seeing the reactions on the forum today, we decided to explain ourself here and also to run that script again so it'll leave the first 10 bogus extra tickets (if any) on each account and remove the rest. Just so you realise, that's us giving away for free over 100.000 tickets as compensation for that bug. You should see an extra line explaining the operation in your history in the coming days.

Giving tens of thousands tickets by mistake is a very serious problem for Totem and there is no way we can let that go. I hope you'll be able to understand where we stand."

That was really crazy. The user becava reported the same day that he had 4294967278 tickets in his account.

Continue...

People kept stashing tickets for a while, gathering in many cases way more than 200 of those in a non bug-delivery fashion.

On February 06, 2009, on the thread "The end of free tickets" it was announced... well, just that:

"We decided to stop giving free tickets to compensate when customers subscribe a recuring membership and then buy too many girls using tickets so we end up not having enough left to deliver one each day. There is nothing wrong with using tickets to get models immediatly, but it is the customer responsability not ours if he choose to pay twice for the same model. We've been unhappy with the current system, seeing users account loaded with hundreds of tickets that can't be used for anything since they bought all the girls already.

This change only concern customer who subscribed to a monthly membership and then buy all the girls with tickets as well."

So, that basically wrap up this tale, except for a lingering effect that might have some monetary effect in the incoming DeskBabes product for those that are still insanely stocked with free tickets. On August 09, 2009 the user 29158swc asked in the humongous thread "New product" if the tickets gotten through VG would be usable to buy in the lesbian site.

By Rex, on August 10, 2009.

"this has not been decided yet. On one side, there is no reason tickets shouldnt work on all our sites, on the other side, the system have been giving more free tickets than it should have been for a long while, so we have to look into this before the release."

The crazy weekend.

This bug raised it ugly head last year, disrupting and undermining, and leaving behind an stella of... free shows.

Among many other annoyances this might be the one recognized as THE "Mega-bug", but also it was kinda named the "Generous bug" after the outcome.

On Friday, August 28, 2009, in the thread "I suddenly got all my trailers as full shows in my collection", by Starryk, the users started to report exactly that: their trailers became full shows. But not just that, many users also got full shows not on schedule, ten or more were added to the collections just by using the check for updates button or by initiating the program.

It might sound as a naughty christmas morning or a visit of the fairy godmother of porn, but many users felt more worried than jolly, wondering if their tickets would be taken away or if they would be charged latter for the unsolicited shows.

Saturday arrived and people got even more free shows. The office remained silent and the crowd growth impatient. To make things worst, the website was almost irresponsive, the servers crumbled down, purchased cards weren't delivered, collections failed to update and disappeared... the VGHD ship encountered the iceberg. Many threads were opened about it, but the thread "VgHD all fouled Up", by Mykro, on Saturday, August 29, 2009, kinda gathered the general concern.

It was until the sunday, when there was a brief message from the company.

By lezardo, on Sunday August 30, 2009: "We had 2 problems: people who are hammering websites with automatic scripts, and an internal problem with a script, which all gave full shows to some people.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Result is that we had databases problems and slow/not working website for some hours.

For the moment, just enjoy your extra full shows, you won't be blamed for this (is it really a problem ? if yes: don't download them, if no: enjoy).

We will investigate and give more information on monday."

Monday came and gone with no further information though, but things started to normalize little by little.

Continue...

On September 01, 2009, on the thread "Card disappearing from collection and replaced by a different one", started, well, by me, the "swapping bug", a new spawn of the weekend nightmare, was exposed. One or more cards evaporated from the users collections and profiles and were replaced by another cards, leaving no visible evidence of the previous ownership. This bug wasn't as massively extended, but it made people to search in their stock relying only on the faulty memory to detect the probable swaps, especially hard for those that got their cards through a subscription, cause those don't leave a trace in the "My history" record.

Continue...

On September 02, 2009, in the thread "Update about the week end problems" by Rex, the official words eased the troubled minds:

"We had problems over the week end with some scripts, over 29.000 of you receveid from one to five full shows instead of trailers. This made all our servers crawl for a few days due to the increased bandwidth usage. We fixed most of the issues Monday, some other side problems surfaced yesterday with cards dissapearing and being replaced by other cards and that should be fixed too now.

We decided NOT to remove the full shows that you guys received because of that bug, enjoy them :) As for the cards being replaced by others, if you've been affected, please contact customer service mentioning the cards you lost and they'll fix that for you."

And so, almost everyone ended up pretty satisfied with the free shows that freaked them up in the beginning of this mess.

May the mega-bug rest in peace, and if free shows ever come into the users collections again, may they come with a nice note from Totem attached.

The reign of Morgane.

This story is kinda funny. Not a bug really, even if many felt it like that, cause it was certainly annoying.

As commented before, the special offers were once upon a time the trailers you got in your calendar. With the version 1.0.2.32, released on July 02, 2009, the calendar was dropped and the special offer was placed in the website. Many surely remember that the first incarnation of the new business model was to place an stock of 200 cards of a single chick and, once depleted, offer a different girl. The stock changed way too fast and many people ***** about that so, very quikly, it was incremented from 200 to 400 cards to make it last a little bit longer.

Now, the idea was to place in that special offer only the "best" girls, along with the new releases and duos. "Best" meant the highest ranked girls and the threshold was fixed at 9 or better. There were only a fistful of shows and girls that ranked that high at the time, so the repetition was constant and tiresome.

The crowd was very unhappy with this, but many realized that the rating system, broken in fact by letting non card owners to vote, this time had a real influence over the events. So, way too many users messed up with the ratings, most likely trying to make their favourite chicks to climb up into the 9 mark and to make the top girls drop out.

Ah, but the result was that almost no girl impulsed that way reached the magical 9, but several former 9 babes went down, leaving the highest podium basically to Morgane and her shows.

Hence, the queen Morgane started her reign thas was widely known as "VirtuaMorgane". That it's well documented in the first pages of the absurdly long thread "actual Special offer", started by mareko3, on July 11, 2009.

On July 20, 2009, the special offer was fixed, lowering the threshold a bit and allowing the users to scape more frequently of the lovely sight of the queen of VGHD, Morgane the First, that ruled almost uncontested the special offer for about two weeks, that seemed like an eternity to many.

Adult supervision required.

Finally, an story that it's still developing. The polls have been manipulated for some time now by one or more individuals with a very low intellect, most likely resented creeps with awkward social skills.

Anyway, there's a glitch that let dumb users to ***** the polls and add as many votes as they like. The glitch can be exploited in more than one way, widely known by now.

This form of vandalism was discovered last december in some of the funny polls created by Severin24 at the time.

Then, the tampering was definitely obvious when a mommies's basement dweller ruined a very interesting poll in the thread "On Strike for Ethnic Diversity", as reported by the OP, titilate, on January 22, 2010:

"We obviously had someones attention and had them very concerned with our success in this Poll for Ethnic Diversity.
So no matter what turns up at the top of this thread we know that the vast majority wish changes to occur.
I guess 2 year olds or equivilant can manage to sneak onto this site and forum after all.

But you know the old saying : "Kids" will be kids."

Lol. Well, the issue was further discussed in the thread "Poll bug: multiple voting by a single user", by Spacephantom, on January 25, 2010 with an interesting demonstration.

In my view, the polls are important cause many users that read the forums, but that chose to not post, have a way to express their opinion. Sometimes the polls might have some more relevance, like those in the casting forum that maybe, just maybe, help to take a decision about our future girls.

The problem is unsolved yet, but will see if it is fixed when the new website arrives.

And that's all for this theme, folks.

Glad to be back after a voluntary exile. And thanks for all those nice PMs, friends. ;)

@Oquijan
Great to see you back and posting on the forum again. Absolutely fascinating stuff as always.

Just a footnote to the story of the poll bug.

Our friendly neighbourhood mod, the graybeard, actually raised the point on the Totem team's forum as a consequence of my demonstration and after having a go at it himself. As far as I'm aware, there was never any answer from any of the Totem team on the matter.

So while I'm still hopeful that the bug may be fixed when the revamped site is released, I'm not holding my breath.

I will not post the whole post I put in the team forum because it goes into detail of how poll hacking is done but I did post there and it has been viewed 22 times but no answer as to what is happening with it. I posted about this along with another problem of editing posts.


by thegraybeard on Tue Jan 26, 2010 05:14 pm I don't know if I can get this explained where everyone will understand but will try.

This is something you can do with any poll thread as long as you haven't voted that poll yet.



SexyMakeup volunteered to help me test this as she still has a regular member star rather than a staff star, she posted back verifying it, Thanks again little lady.

I also posted an idea that would make emptying our message boxes that would take some of the hassle out of that but so far no answer on that one either ... but, the PM box idea may just be coming with the new site .. ;), so there is a chance the poll bug will be fixed also.

@Oquijan, You have a great gift my friend, you can take what may seem as dull history and make it erupt into a cornicopia of informative, enlightening and entertaining masterpiece. Assisted by your relavent placement of pictures as an enhancement. This,I am sure,is of great benefit, especially to those who can relate to pictorials moreso than to written language:) I want to thank you for all your research, documentation and hard work to bring this to us. Also a great thesis for your PhD :)
I would also like to thank thegraybeard for all he has done to bring problems to the attention of Totem,such as the poll prob, and assist them in hopefully fixing same. Although in this regard I hope he has better luck than we have in getting Totem to provide more ethnic diversity of girls:) Ooops, in ***** again for posting this in a non-related thread:(

P.S. Welcome back guys,, you've been missed:)

Then again, many thanks for the nice comments and many thanks thegraybeard and spacephantom for the aditional information.

Thanks for the words of support, titilate. I sent all this stuff to Harvard, but seems that my PhD application was rejected for some obscure reasons. I think i managed to lure several guys in the academic committee into this product, though, cause i've been asked to write a 10,000 words essay with the theme: "Sexual explicit behaviour, really explicit content and not faded, and why bother buying anything that is not that way?". I was urged to deliver it today, so i better start typing. ;)

I LOVE this thread Oquijan!!! Some very good stuff. They should have you write a book about the history. I know that doesn't make sense but reading it now... I'm pretty entertained!!! Your the man, Oquijan!

Update.
Good news on the poll bug. I've been testing the new site and it's fixed. I posted a test poll in which I voted ten times and it only registered as one vote.

Thanks, Spacephantom. That wraps up that little tale with a nice note.

Many thanks CyberVixen and Coldinjected. Glad you're liking the thread so far. ;)

And Cold... A book? I was thinking more in a movie. Hum, i'll see if Denisa K. is available to play the part of my girlfriend in the film. ;)

Nice work Oquijan, a movie??, I think you maybe should turn your thoughts to writing up "America's Most Irritating" .... roflmao

Lol. Yeah, i think i could do that. A T.V. show then, just need to find someone who likes way too much the screen business. Do you know someone like that? Lmao.

Why, yes I do, a few, or couple anyway, that crave attention so bad they would do anything to get attention, they would probably even be on the show for free just to get the attention they SO crave .... roflmao

Then you could even notify the president that you have started this wonderful show and get backing you need to pull it off, oh and don't forget to include a screen shot and start the letter of with "hey, check out the screen shot"

Nice! The show is taking form already. It will be a reality show and would be also pretty cheap to make, since the players will be perfectly willing to do endless screen shots for free.

I'm afraid it might only last for one season before getting canceled. Cheap actors maybe, but lousy performers and repetitive content can't make it for a long run. Lol

Very true Cyber, I stand corrected .... lmao

True again Oquijan, it would probably be a short season before everyone got pissed about it too .... lmao