Coupons now 35% and not 50%?

**bizraterx** · 11-04-2004, 06:37 PM

Hello I

was wondering why when I use the coupon that I bought form the store it only deducts like $33 out of a $100. Did the

coupon chnage or something because in September when I boutgh another one it was for 50%. Any help would be

appreciated bruce or anyone else. Thanks

**belgareth** · 11-04-2004, 06:53 PM

Bruce posted the following

three days ago under Customer Service:

Guys,

Got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?

Good news? OK. The good news is that you can buy as many discount coupons as you want and they should all work fine.

Mobes, I am not sure what happened with yours, but I suspect you bought them both before using either one of them.

Am I right? More good news is that we will definitely be having the used products sale again at some point. It has

always been our habit/policy to wait until we had a pretty hefty batch of used stuff before releasing them for sale.

The items move very quickly and the hot ones are gone within a matter of days anyway.

Bad news: The price of the

coupons went up from 5000 to 10000.

Worse news: The coupons are no longer 50% discounts, they are 35%

discounts.

It is true that the main problem with the coupon was the loopholes in the arcades and

banking systems, but there was yet another issue to pop up. I can't go into too much detail, but coupons were being

used by folks who weren't even members of the forum.

We will continue to have some sort of points driven coupon

which will at least outstrip the normal 20% coupons by a good deal, and we will continue the used products sales on

and off as we always have and only offer them to forum members.

Bruce

**real_wiseman** · 11-16-2004, 08:37 AM

I think part of the problem

lies in that the coupon code was a plain word, not connected AFAIK to a particular person.

To mitigate this a

hashsum - perhaps md5? - could be used where the users nick on the board as well as an insanely hard-to-guess

saltvalue (!) is hashed together to make the coupon code. The saltvalue should be known to the board admins only of

course.

This scheme is probably still vulnerable to a dictionary attack , but it is still way, way better

than a simple "keyword" as the coupon code.

// rw

**Bruce** · 11-16-2004, 08:52 AM

Yeah, it definitely needs some work.

The old FBC area used to generate a unique password which could only be used once. We need something like

that.

B