Overview
Vastness.net was a website that eviltechie ran essentially as a personal site. But it ended up being used to host many of his most well-known add-ons and tools for Bolt. The server was also used to host a some of the collaboration projects he worked on with DistortedSmile for her Bolt Help site.
After Bolt died, Vastness.net was decommissioned and forgotten about. The domain name even allowed to expire. Someone apparently thought it was valuable though, because it is now for sale as a premium name for over $10,000 (USD).
Bolt Profile Logger
By far the most well-known and influential add-on that eviltechie made for Bolt was the Profile Logger. The purpose of this add-on was to give Bolt members the ability to see who had visited their member profile and what they had looked at.
The Profile Logger was made possible because Bolt allowed Javascript to be run in a custom field on member profiles. Because it was Javascript running under Bolt's domain, it was able to read the Bolt session cookie of profile visitors. It took that information, combined with the URL of the profile page, and sent it to Vastness.net for processing. The data was parsed and stored in a database. Clicking a link in the member's profile allowed you to view the historical activity on their profile.
Quite a few people helped out by sponsoring the development of the Profile Logger. The financial sponsors were (click to see photos): TheMixMonkey, pm2006, IceAcid, AbsolutMiranda, anniebabie18_02, xx_OMMM_xx, AFitchCheerGirl, creepy_kitty, ShaunW, Sha-Bang, WolfenStorm, DizzyGoo125, LoLiEpOpPe, mozartsghost, scoobydoo2423, Kink-e-gurl, DistortedSmile, cutting_me_away, vampirejessie05, guffdaddy, pepperjam, Julys, jamnamerican, abercrombiegeg, artichoke_luv83
DistortedSmile's Bolt Help site introduced a lot of members to the Profile Logger. Bolt Help even had a couple profile logger designs that were available there exclusively. Other than word of mouth, Bolt Help was probably the biggest source of profile logger users.
Later in the life of the profile logger, a lesser known aspect of it became useful. The Profile Logger began storing the session cookies after it parsed the username from them. The interesting thing about Bolt session cookies is they never change. So, a session cookie can be moved to a different computer, and that computer will be able to access the site as the member who's cookie was moved. This information wasn't stored for the malicious purpose of accessing other member's accounts. It was stored so that we would have a way to restore account access to members who forgot their password and registration email. It was used many times for that purpose. At one point, a full list of active session cookies was given to beguile, in case it was needed when eviltechie was unavailable. That list is here: boltsters.csv (2.8MB). It includes slightly over 50,000 unique entries. This information was never used maliciously and was kept secure.
The Profile Logger had one less than ethical use near the end of Bolt2. But that will be explained in the Helldot section.
Active Topics RSS Feed
Shortly after Bolt began showing the most recently active topics on their message boards, eviltechie released an RSS feed created by parsing the Active Topics off Bolt's site. This enabled anyone to keep up-to-date on the Bolt message board activity using any RSS feed reader.
Bolt Activity Tracker
The activity tracker was an add-on released for Firefox that quite simply tracked all interaction a user had with Bolt.com and then provided reports and statistics based on that interaction.
It sounds invasive, because it was. However, users were clearly informed of its purpose, and could disable it at any time. The majority of users either used it because they were curious, to prove their "reg" status on certain Bolt boards, or because it allowed them to put an online status button on their Bolt profile letting profile visitors know they were online and where to find them on Bolt at that moment.
Bolt Blacklist
The blacklist was a Bolt profile add-on interacted with the profile logger and allowed members to block specific people from viewing their profile. It also had the capability to globally block certain users form visiting any profile using the profile logger.
This stirred-up a lot of controversy and after proving the concept worked the project was scrapped.
Bolt Profile Archive
Many Bolt members extensively customized their profile pages. Periodically, those customizations would simply be eaten by the system and lost. The profile archive service helped alleviate that problem. A Bolt member could tell the service to archive their profile and it would go out and read their profile and then save it to a database. Members could later retrieve their archived profile if they ever needed it.
Boltfolio Logger
When Boltfolio was launched it was a much different format than Bolt originally used and the original Bolt profile logger was incompatible. The Boltfolio logger project was started to accommodate the new site.
One of the major changes implemented on the new site was that Bolt started using real session cookies, that actually expire and that contain no personally identifiable information. That hurdle was overcome by the fact that they still allowed Javascript on member profiles. In order to get the username of the person viewing a profile the Boltfolio logger would read their session cookie, then send it to the Vastness.net server which would make a direct HTTP request to Boltfolio using the recorded session cookie, it would then parse the resulting page and locate the username of the user who the session cookie belonged to. After that it was merely a matter of parsing the URL of the content being viewed.
The Boltfolio logger was fully-functional and mere days from public release when Bolt finally realized that maybe they shouldn't allow arbitrary Javascript to be run under their domain. That killed the logger though and there was much sadness. Eviltechie attempted getting the logger code added to Bolt's official code. But negotiations were unsuccessful, perhaps in part due to some of the big fans of the logger among Bolt's staff having already jumped ship.
