How to tell if people use votebots online?

September 27, 2006 5:52 PM

Is it possible to tell if other people are using votebots or scripts in an online contest?

I've got a short film in the D&D Fan Film Contest. Right now, it's the semifinals. People vote for the videos they like and on October 10, they pick the top ten and send them to a panel of judges who determine the winners. You can see all the entries here http://www.gamevideos.com/video/channel/DnD

Voting originally began on Sept. 15 but they stopped it because some videos were using scripts to vote themselves up. On the 18th, they took all the videos down and a few videos were still getting 500 votes an hour or more, like Soar Becoming for example. Take a look at the discussion here to see what I am talking about. http://boards.1up.com/zd/board/message?board.id=gvdisc&message.id=352&page=2


Gamevideos has added on a CAPTCHA system to stop scripts but I still think some of the videos are cheating. It's been about a day now and some have over 2000 votes so far. My video, Best Game Ever has a lot of people pulling for it. I've gone to many different websites to promote it and it's fairly popular on the something awful forums, which has a huge community. I've also gotten my friends and family to vote for it. However, it's barely gotten 700 votes in the same time period. I can barely find any mention of soar becoming on the web. So how can this be? Is it possible to use a script against a CAPTCHA system?

posted by clockworkjoe to computers & internet (9 comments total)

If you run a porn site, for example, you can just inject that captcha into the picture stream, and people will quickly type the answer, and this is then shunted back to the original bot. I'm sure somewhere people are being hired to solve captchas, etc. Google video and the captcha people on this issue.
posted by shownomercy at 5:58 PM on September 27, 2006

CAPTCHAs can be defeated by copying them off the original site, displaying them on another, more popular site (i.e., x-rated), and then forwarding the answers back to the original site for validation, along with the vote you want the program to execute.
posted by odinsdream at 5:58 PM on September 27, 2006

The kind of CAPTCHA attack mentioned above only applies to static CAPTCHAs. If you dynamically generate the CAPTCHA, creating a one-off image for each visit, you should be immune from that.
posted by matthewr at 6:06 PM on September 27, 2006

Is there any way to tell if someone else is running a script if you don't have access to their server logs?
posted by clockworkjoe at 6:16 PM on September 27, 2006

matthewr; that isn't true. If you visit a CAPTCHA site, and you can copy the image and immediately receive an answer from a pool of porn viewers on another site, you can instantly fill in the form just like a human would.
posted by odinsdream at 6:17 PM on September 27, 2006

Ah, didn't think of that, odinsdream.
posted by matthewr at 6:27 PM on September 27, 2006

Depending on the expertise of the ballot-stuffer, it can be hard to tell if votes are coming from a script even if you do have access to the server logs. Without the server logs it's impossible to prove anything (although the situations you mention are certainly suggestive).

That said, most of the cheaters in these kind of contests are pretty small-time, since there's not much on the line. If that's the case they probably aren't going to have the technical savvy or capability to vote from lots of different systems, so the organizers may be able to screen based on IP block or something.
posted by inkyz at 7:07 PM on September 27, 2006

Thanks for the info. It's frustrating to let them do this but I guess all I can do is keep getting people to vote. :)
posted by clockworkjoe at 8:28 PM on September 27, 2006

Note that the number of views does not necessarily = the number of votes. So, Your friend the cheater could be using a script to up his number of views, but he might still only have 100 votes.
posted by antifuse at 2:46 AM on September 28, 2006