Xavier Defrang

Not that I care about lame online contests but I thought it would be fun to probe the actual expertise of the self-proclaimed web specialists running the damn thing.

It took approximately 10 minutes to write a bot that votes for the only blog who deserves it. This script issues a valid vote encoded into an URL and hides behind the Google Translate cluster to pass through the IP address check. Now that's a 2.0ish mash-up, isn't it? ;)

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'cgi'

def who_gives_a_shit?
  (1 + rand(5)).to_s
end

params = {
  'votepushed' => 'votepushed',
  'survey' => '496',
  'answer1' => '2',
  'answer2' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer3' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer4' => who_gives_a_shit?,
  'answer5' => who_gives_a_shit?,
}

query_string = params.collect { |k, v| 
  "#{k}=#{CGI.escape(v)}"
}.join('&')

survey_url = 'http://www.lesoir.be'
survey_url += '/special/persoweb2006/results.shtml?' 
survey_url += query_string

proxy_url_path = '/translate?langpair=en|en&u='

proxied_vote_url_path = proxy_url_path + CGI.escape(survey_url)

Net::HTTP.get_print 'www.google.com', proxied_vote_url_path

I'm not affiliated with Mehmet or any other contestant whatsoever. I won't even run this script to fake the vote, I don't care. I just did this because:

1. It's fun and easy
2. It demonstrates what an online vote is worth when it's not so well implemented
3. I'm a bad boy :)

I think I do really love doing useless things.

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