A lot of people think I'm some kind of computer genius because I work at Google and run a couple of blog directories,
Humor-Blogs.com and
Blogerella. You'd be surprised how dense I can be about all this web development stuff though.
For example, did you guys know that some online communities have had problems with users scamming their voting systems? When I found that out, like, yesterday or whenever it was, I was all like "Hunh what?" because I didn't realize that was even POSSIBLE. And then I thought, "Well okay but you'd have to be some kind of HACKER GENIUS to pull off something like that." But you know what? I was WRONG. It's actually not even that hard. See, what some people do is sign up over and over, using a different email address each time, and then vote for their own stuff a whole bunch of times. CRAZY, huh? So it might look like a particular website is really popular, but in reality it's just the same person voting for it over and over. Doesn't that BLOW YOUR MIND? Yeah, it turns out that email addresses are FREE and they give them away to pretty much anyone! I had NO IDEA. But then I've only been doing web development for TWELVE YEARS.
So then I was all like "It's a good thing that Humor-Blogs.com and Blogerella are all made up of cool people who wouldn't try to take advantage of me and/or cheat their fellow bloggers!" Because, after all,
whatever would I do if that sort of thing started happening? I mean, how do you
stop something like that? I'm no match for that sort of HACKER GENIUS. First of all, how would you even know if it was
happening? How could you tell if a bunch of different users were really just the same person logging in with a different email address? I mean, I suppose if they kept using the same computer, and that computer had some kind of unique identifier -- let's call it an IP address -- that you could retrieve, you might be able to figure it out, if you were REALLY SMART. But jeez, you'd have to write a script that would grab the IP address and store it EVERY TIME SOMEBODY VOTED FOR A POST.
Well, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of work to me. To do that, you'd probably need some kind of CRYPTIC COMMANDS like:
strSQL = "INSERT INTO post_ratings (post_id, user_id, rating, user_ip) VALUES (" & intPostID & "," & Utils.GetCookieInt(Request, "UserID") & "," & intRating & ",'" & Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") & ")"
dbAccess.ExecSQL(strSQL)
I mean, who can make sense of THAT? It's like reading Phoenician or something. Somebody call John Travolta's character from
Phenomenon; I'm in over my head! And not only that, but then you'd need to write some fancy schmancy SQL (is that even a word???) query to make sense of the data. I mean, if you were REALLY GOOD you could probably come up with something like:
SELECT user_ip FROM post_ratings GROUP BY user_ip HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT user_id) > 5
Now I'm no EXPERT, but I
GUESS something like that would give you a list of all users who seem to be sharing a computer with more than FOUR OTHER USERS. Wow, that's a busy computer! I suppose that's the typical suburban household these days though, huh? Six people logging into the same computer in rapid succession, all to vote for their favorite blog on Humor-Blogs.com. So, you know, NOTHING SUSPICIOUS THERE.
There was even one household where there were at least TEN PEOPLE voting from the same computer. That must be a tightly knit family. I can imagine them sitting around the dinner table talking about their favorite blog, and how they love VOTING FOR IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER INSTEAD OF WORKING OR DOING THEIR HOMEWORK OR DOING SOMETHING ELSE MORE PRODUCTIVE.
Anyway, like I said, I'm just glad that I can rely on the HONOR SYSTEM, because I don't have time to deal with FRAUDULENT VOTING. I mean, this stuff just gets me ALL FRAZZLED. I freak out and just start pressing keys and pretty soon some of the blog scores get set back to ZERO! Man, I'm lucky I didn't DELETE THOSE BLOG ENTIRELY. There's not telling what might happen if I start mucking around in the database again.
To be honest, I'm not even sure which blogs I reset, so I'm not positive I could fix their scores even if I had that kind of brain power. So I'm REAL SORRY is yours is one of the blogs that got reset to zero. If you want, you can leave a comment on this post explaining that yours was one of the blogs that was able to inspire a whole clan of inbred mountain people to huddle around their one computer and vote for it over and over and over, and I'll see what I can do. I'm sure all of the other Humor-Blogs and Blogerella members would like to know what your secret is.
Otherwise, I guess you could consider this your chance to start over with a blank slate. It's up to you.
Labels: Blogerella, Humor-blogs.com, Jerks