History of Minutes Online (LMBs)

Originally posted here on June 26, 2020:
https://thebrick.boards.net/thread/2588/benboy755s-classic-mb-screenshot-day?page=15

This is a view of the MBs restapi which allowed you to view the total number of minutes you had spent online while logged into your account. I've posted a bit about the minutes in general on my other topic devoted to that. The system was intended to track how many minutes you spent online, and that statistic would contribute to your rank. My take on it was that it was added to stop the spamming and rank racing of the old boards - if you had to wait to rank up it wasn't really a race. However, the system was very glitchy and they only ironed it out on July 1, 2015, to the best of my knowledge. Now for a brief history lesson :P

Somehow this guy Jonencloud figured out that you could view these hidden stats back in like 2013 or something and decided to publicize it in November 2014. I guess the mods had a momentary lapse of reason or something and let this info go live - even though it was the primary requirement stymieing people ranking up. Jonen made a topic for it and by some lovably bizarre coincidence all the highest ranked users immediately saw the topic and commented their number. It became extremely evident within like ten pages of the topic that higher ranked users had more minutes. I was able to figure out ballparks for most of the minutes requirements just from reading the comments. I'd been stuck on figuring out the rank requirements for the past year, and suddenly it clicked. Unfortunately benboy755 was banned at the time (for Nashtron) and I was posting as 42Varda. I realized Varda was held back by minutes, so figured benboy would have the same problem.

I believe not long after Jonen made this information live I realized a glitch in the minutes system. I think I was logged into some account (no idea which) at this point along with another user from LMBW. The minutes statistic worked such that it only updated for three reasons: 1) you were inactive on the MBs for 60 minutes, 2) you logged out, or 3) the system restarted - this would happen on rare occasions. Now, I was logged into this account and had checked it again after a while and it had increased without me logging out or timing out and the MBs hadn't restarted. Then I realized that the other person's (man I swear this was Samed5 but I HONESTLY have absolutely no clue at this point :P ) session had timed out and their minutes had added to the total. So independent sessions on the boards counted separately towards minutes... so if you were online on your phone and your computer for an hour, you'd have 120 more minutes.

Before I had realized this I had also realized the obvious trick: if you leave yourself signed into the MBs and keep refreshing the boards you will gain minutes. For some reason there are "auto refreshing" addons to every internet browser so I could get one of these, sign in, set the timer, and log minutes while I was off doing something else. While sleeping, one loses like 7-9 hours... so I'd set it to refresh then, too.

Couple this with the "multiple sessions" fact, and I could set three internet browsers plus their respective incognito modes to log minutes for me.... so for every minute I'd be online I'd have 6, just from my computer. To put this into perspective, a day has 1440 minutes, so in a given day I could rack up north of 8000 minutes just by setting my refresher. Sometimes I'd run multiple accounts at once to drive up their minutes for myself. :P Using these tricks I got Varda from rank 10 (low 20000s in minutes) to rank 12 (low 40000s) in three days.

Now, conveniently, I was able to get benboy unbanned at this point and I started using my old tricks on him. I had all the numbers figured out for the ranks 17 and below, but was operating blind on what I'd need to go higher - as at this point I was confident that minutes were the only thing holding me back. To the best of my knowledge I think I got every rank 7 - 24 on the minutes req. :P I knew rank 16 was 100,000 minutes or thereabouts, while rank 17 was around 115,000. Given that none of the lower ranks jumped dramatically, it followed that rank 18 should be around 130,000. I wasted no time figuring this out, and got to rank 18 at 130k minutes, as predicted, just a few days after I was unbanned. At this point I was thirsty for more, I'd finally cracked the ranks after over a year, so I got to rank 19 at 145,000 minutes just a few days later. I suspected that there would be a more dramatic jump to Cowboy, rank 20.

While doing this, I was simultaneously pumping information out on the boards using Varda and Benboy to advertise that people who "had trouble ranking up" were simply stuck on the minutes, and advocated them using refresher tools to help themselves out. I cannot remember if I ever made direct reference to the multiple browsers trick, but I probably did. The mods (Keighlian I believe) took exception to this, and even while the ranks 20+ required hundreds of thousands of minutes, not to mention tens of thousands of posts - and the minutes were broken as pacman and diglett already had impossible numbers - they said we were not to cheat the ranks. I then stopped talking about it as much, and cooled off on logging minutes overnight for a while, however, I figured that they wouldn't possibly be checking, and it had been a month since I had last ranked up - and rank 20 couldn't be more than like 250,000 minutes... so I started up logging minutes again. Apparently Keighlian had a vendetta against me because I got permanently banned (a second time) for that :P

Man why did I type this from memory this is just setting the background for why I took this screenshot in 2015 :P

So I was banned, and didn't really have anything else to do with the minutes. I'd figured out the requirements for ranks 1 - 19, but now could do little else. I didn't post a whole lot in early 2015, I was bummed out about the whole situation. However, AwesomePythor appeared out of nowhere and started posting and I decided I'd like to come back instead of posting as Unekitte, so I petitioned to the mods, and they actually unbanned me. I wanted to stay as far away from minutes trouble as possible, even it meant remaining on rank 19 forever.

Now this is the good part that I'm pretty certain almost no one knows :P

However, in April 2015, Skul, who was also stuck on rank 19, randomly decided to see what would happen if you decided to simultaneously log in on like a dozen MB login screens at once. The strangest glitch of the MBs was that doing this would increase both your logins stat and your minutes online stat dramatically. I would open about 50 login screens, then run through them all in about 30 seconds clicking login. This would result in a gain of about 1000 minutes - you could watch your minutes increase incrementally by refreshing the restapi minutes screen. I have no idea why the system worked that way, but it increased your minutes beyond anything I could imagine. Today's screenshot was a result of me watching the counter go up - I screenshotted it when it hit a nice even number.

Now, after Skul and I established this, I was a bit wary of using it, as I'd just gotten unbanned for minutes trickery. However, it was so ridiculous a method that I didn't think I could be caught doing it - after all how would my logins and minutes increase at my manipulation? The glitch was so far fetched I was willing to use it. I'd log maybe 10-20 thousand minutes a week with it, nothing too extreme, and I'd stay away from auto-refreshing. I still never ranked up. I got to 300,000 minutes - more than double than what I'd gotten rank 19 at, and was almost ready to give up. I began to think that likes received from mods might actually be a requirement. Then, magically, at 317,000 minutes, I finally ranked up.

Thus you had a 162000 minute gap from Rank 19 to 20, so I figured that 20 to 21 couldn't be any less - so maybe rank 21 at around 479,000 minutes. I had renewed motivation to exploit this trick, but I was still afraid of ranking up too fast and getting in trouble again. I got Cowboy in late May 2015 and regularly logged minutes throughout June with the intention of reaching Detective in early July. However, on July 1, 2015, the glitch was disabled, as was the multiple browsers trick. I don't know what they did, but the minutes stat worked as it was intended forever after this occasion.

I resorted to logging minutes with auto refresh during the day, never overnight. Eventually I reached 479,000 minutes, but didn't rank up. Nor did I at 500,000. Then in November or December 2015 the restapi was rendered private, so you couldn't even view your minutes stat. However, I could estimate my minutes in a 20,000 minute range, and that was good enough for my purposes. I did not get detective until around 660,000 minutes - essentially double the jump from rank 19 to rank 20. I kept ranking up on minutes, became the second Pilot, finally tying Diglett, but all my wasted time in worrying about being banned cost me, as he still beat me to rank 24, then the boards ended. I am pretty certain that when the mbs ended, I had the most minutes (around 950,000??), though... for whatever good that does me :P

Thus concludes the story of Benboy and the Minutes... a totally unnecessary five part tale to contextualize one screenshot. :P