Monday, July 28th, 2008
Paintball gun trading site TradeMyGun.com recently purchased a Motoplex building and has set up a store and field at 6485 Merchants Drive in LaOtto, IN. The name of the facility is Paintball Plex which consists of a retail store and two indoor turf fields. Plans are in the works for an outdoor field for the summer of 2009.
Monday, July 28th, 2008
As of July 28, 2008, the Pittsburgh All-Americans have decided to no longer play NPPL or any other form of 7-man paintball. By dropping their concentration from the 7-man format, they can focus more on playing X-ball. Prior to their decision of only playing X-ball, the All-Americans played in the NPPL, NXL, and the Millenium Series. Even though the All-Americans will not be playing 7-man, some of their players will be guesting for the rest of the season on other teams.
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Gary Burrow’s, 51, was in the field and was struck by a paintball at Skirmish in Nottingham in January 2005. The paintball hit was under his chin. In an attempt to reduce the swelling from the impact, Burrow put ice over the welt, but two months later, inflammation reoccured and he sought out medical attention. Turns out, the lump was Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Months after the cancer removal, doctors found that there were two more lumps in his groin. As of now, Burrow is receiving chemotherapy for lumps in his stomach amd chest. Burrow says he owes his life to paintball because if he hadn’t got shot in the neck that day, he would not be here today.
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
OK, so here’s the deal. Some kid shot another kid in the face at a so called paintball birthday party. Apparently, they decided shooting someone in the face was a good idea, especially when he had no mask on…fucking genius. And of all places they played in someone’s backyard, now only if there were places that were specifically designated for playing paintball with rules and regulations and proper supervision.
Good ‘ol backyard paintball play. Seemingly, adults with little to no experience with paintball guns are qualified to supervise. Hey kids, wear a mask while you’re playing a game but when we’re done you can take your mask off but still play with the guns. Don’t worry, it’s ok, nothing bad will happen.
Blind boy’s mommy wants to ban paintball guns in Portland, CT, which apparently does exist. She says she wants to prevent this type of accident from ever happeneing again, so which brings to mind, how many fucking dumbasses are in Connecticut?
I would like [a paint ball gun] to be treated like a rifle or a pistol; it’s something that can do damage to you, just like a rifle.
So a paintball gun that shoots balls of paint can shoot theoretical bullets that can kill people. You what else can do damage to you? Paper! Paper cuts hurt like a fucking bitch.
My personal feeling is that these teenagers are too young and inexperienced to know how to be safe with it.
Translation: Your kid is a fucking idiot and can’t do anything. He’s a piece of shit and doesn’t deserve to live. He should just kill himself.
I would basically blame those kids’ parents. … They are not taking responsibility for their kids
OMG! Will someone please think of the children!
Then you have genius commentary like this. Yeah, requiring people to be 18, that’s a good idea. Why not 21, since that’s when you can drink, legally. Or 25, since that’s when renting a car is cheaper. Or hell, why not 65, since that’s when you can get social security. God damn, I love assigning arbitrary ages on something that has absolutely no research to prove it relevant other than the thinking of children campaign. Stupid fucktards.
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Early Thursday morning, a student at Penn State University opened fire from a second floor balcony with a paintball gun. The student, Christopher Renshaw, fired at street signs and anything else that crossed his path, according to the local police. “Renshaw, was cited for criminal mischief and faces fines of up to $300, in addition to cleanup costs.”
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
Highlights from NPPL Buffalo 2008. Brought to you by JT Paintball
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Professional
Semi-Professional
Division 1
Division 2
Division 3
Pump Division
Update: Apparently there was a pump division.
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
JT USA is looking for a web developer. The job is in Betonville, AR. Basically, you need to know how to make website, update them, make them look pretty, and understand the internet.
Here’s a list of some the skills they require:
- HTML / CSS
- PHP
- Javascript
- Action Script
- Experience with third Party APIs (i.e. flickr, twitter, YouTube)
- Adobe Flash / interactive design
- Adobe Photoshop / ImageReady
- Microsoft Office
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
About a month ago, someone alerted me to a usenet posting from some fed up advertiser. I was going to write about it, but never finished the post. Then someone emailed with the same post from rec.sport.paintball, whose named happened to be “Paintball Truth.” So screw it, here’s the post:
Is 68caliber misleading it’s advertisers?
As a prospective advertiser in the paintball world, we’ve been looking for high quality paintball sites to advertise on and promote our products. Advertising budgets are tight, to say the least, and we actively seek to get the most out of our dollar from a value added standpoint. In short, we want to get the biggest bang out of our buck. So we do research on all our potential sites we might advertise on.
While we found some fantastic places to start our new ventures, I want to warn other advertisers about one in particular: 68caliber.com
Do not, I repeat, do not advertise there.Bold statement from an anonymous source right? I better have some facts to back it up right? Well, I do.
First, let’s go over what we are shown. This is what I see when looking for potential places to advertise. We first see their background logo:
http://www.68caliber.com/logo2.gif“The best advertising deal in the industry
Seen up to a half million times per day!”Wow. Sounds impressive. I would love to get my ad shown to that many people. That means that my ad will be viewed 15 million times in 30 days. That’s great exposure. Of course it only says “up to”, so it might be a little bit less. So even 10 million times in a month would be fantastic if the price is right. So what is the price? With prices ranging anywhere from $150 to $500 and up per month (depending on a 1 month or 12 month contract, the prices vary). But let’s say I just wanted 1 month, and it was $500 for that month. It might be worth my while if I’m getting that many views.
So being interested still, I looked into it further. What I found out, is that these statistics where no where near the truth.
After seeing the pbnation report on other paintball sites, and seeing 68caliber on the bottom of the list, and not even showing in some cases; In the Top 20 Total Monthly Unique Visitors, 68caliber doesn’t even show up.So I dove into this deeper. I didn’t see their site using any qualified programs to gather web traffic usage. Google Analytics is a very popular one, and is free. Most people use this. But I did not see the javascript code for it, or any other code for that fact. I assumed they must have just been using the server stats (which is a poor measure, and why no one uses it).
Sure enough, the page existed: http://www.68caliber.com/plesk-stat/webstat/
Upon seeing their true stats, from their own server, only then did I realize I was trying to be taken.
Using their May statistics as a bellwether, as it was the last full month as of this writing, we can plainly see that a half million visits can not be true. On the contrary, for the entire month of May, their total visits was only 289,086 - a far cry from the half million a day I was lead to believe from their own background image. It took an entire month, just to get half way to what I was sold on for a day! Tsk, tsk.
Even if we use the hits as a method of tracking (no one uses hits, as a hit just means a request to the server. So one person with one visit can be dozens of hits), we don’t come close to their self-proclaimed stats.
So of those 289,086 visits, how many were unique? We dive in deeper to find a bigger conspiracy. We look at the top 30 referrers to this site in their own stats and find:
http://www.68caliber.com/plesk-stat/webstat/usage_200805.html#TOPSITESThe top referrer? The top referrer is the website http://www.default-domain.com , with 156,425 of the total visits. That’s over 50% of their stats coming from one person. So who is default-domain?
Default-domain.com is a web hosting service. When you go to their link, it brings you to http://www.1and1.com , it’s the same page, just a different name.
Now you look up 68caliber.com in whois - http://www.whois.sc/68caliber.comWho is 68caliber’s web hosting company / name server ? It is also 1and1.com
What does all this technical information mean? It means that as of last month, over half of their hits and visits came from themselves. Now whether that means was on purpose to bolster their stats, or by accident due to a coding method to create their RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds, the end result is the same.
While I have nothing against Dale, and the fine job he does reporting the news, I just can’t see doing business with them, and foresee the eventual demise of the site. Even their forums and site is outdated. More than half their forum sections were last updated back in 2007 and some last done in 2006, and one of their front page bold and highlighted features: E-Money Show ( http://www.68caliber.com/emoney.php )was last updated in 2006. I don’t see a reason to keep that section highlighted anymore.In short, I will not be advertising with 68caliber.com Their statistics don’t even come close to those we are led to believe, even when bolstered by their own servers, this month alone, 68caliber’s stats from their own server is over 66 percent from their own domain.
Of course, if I’m wrong here, and I can’t read the numbers correctly, I’d be happy for 68caliber.com to correct me.antian.miller@aceville.co.uk
He mentions that most of the views come from 68caliber themselves. Pretty sure that this is due to the fact that for portions of their front page make HTTP request to their own server to display parts like Top Stories and News. I guess just doing SQL queries in the page is complicated, but whatever.
Also, I don’t believe they have RSS feeds. They have “syndicate” things, which are just javascript widgets that you put on your site. In order to do that though, they do use JSON feeds. If there are RSS feeds, please enlighten me.
And our traffic? It’s more like a few hundred a day.
