DraupnirSoft review: an abandoned TGP trade script

What DraupnirSoft does on a TGP or toplist

A trade script sits on your own site, counts the hits each partner sends you, and sends clicks back in proportion. DraupnirSoft calls each partner a trade. Three settings drive it:

• Skim is the share of clicks sent to trades instead of galleries, set per link from 0 to 100% or once in the admin.
• Forces push a fixed number of hits to one trade, hourly or once, which helps a new trade get going.
• Ranking Ratio shapes the outlist, from an even spread near 0.99 to most hits going to the top trades near 0.5.

Productivity, shown as prod, is the average number of clicks per visitor, so 2.5 clicks reads as 250%. Trades above the average prod get a linear bonus and trades below it a penalty. Toplists can be sorted by hits, clicks or quality and rebuilt anywhere from every minute to once every 1,440 minutes.

Will DraupnirSoft run on PHP 7 or PHP 8?

There is no reason to expect it to. The files are IonCube-encoded, and ionCube only lists its PHP 7 loaders as running files from its version 9 encoder, released in 2015, years after the last DraupnirSoft build. The stated requirement is still "PHP 5.2 or better" and no later build exists for either the free or the paid edition. You cannot read or patch the code yourself, and each file header forbids altering it.

Support was only ever offered on the help forum, with email answered only when the forum itself was broken. That forum now returns a 404, as does the demo still advertised on the home page. No company or address is published. The author signs as AmateurFlix, and the file headers carry a copyright notice in the name of Night Raven.

The install routine adds its own risks. The script usually goes in the web root, the install directory has to be set to 777 while it runs, and the install file must be deleted straight after, since anyone who loads it can overwrite your settings.

Running several sites as one DraupnirSoft network

Each network has one master install, and slave installs join it with a password the master generates. You can also mark another webmaster's DraupnirSoft network as trusted, which lets trades with their sites be set up in one click and approved automatically. When your sites need more partners, the script joins new trades on its own, picking sites in the same niche and format.

Build Mode runs for 10, 20 or 30 days. Each day it adds three trades, gives them a small one-off force and deletes the three weakest. Trades that send nothing for ten days can be deleted automatically. The author reports running about 60 copies on one server, helped by an option that delays cron jobs when server load gets too high.

How DraupnirSoft filters cheating traffic

DraupnirSoft suspends a trade automatically when its proxy share is too high, its unique share too low, its prod out of range, its quality under a floor, or too few of its visitors use the languages you pick. Small trades are judged on their last 100 hits when they sent fewer than 100 in 24 hours, so there is no daily minimum. A suspended trade comes back by itself once its numbers recover.

A bot test, enabled by adding an image tracker file to the page, sends suspect visitors to galleries only and can push their toplist clicks to a fraud URL. AOL traffic trips it every time and is only logged. Blacklists cover domains, server IPs, the signup IP of the webmaster and words in the signup form, and the master copies them to every site within an hour or two. The author advises against that sync when a network spans several servers. Public signups can be open, closed, or open with new trades disabled until you review them.

DraupnirSoft pricing and server requirements

The free edition of DraupnirSoft takes under 1% of clicks as payment, takes nothing from toplist clicks and has no feature limits. The paid edition is only offered to existing licence holders, with no price or checkout on the site. A licence covers one domain and can pass to a new owner but not to another domain. The three free licences once on offer have expired.

The server needs Unix or Linux, PHP 5.2 or later, the IonCube Loader, FTP access, a cron job every minute, wget or lynx and allow_url_fopen turned on. MySQL and SSH are not needed. Tracked pages must be .php or .shtml and sit in the script's directory or below it.

DraupnirSoft strengths and limitations