It remained entertaining for a few rounds of voting (each round lasted a week), and then I got bored with it and washed my hands of the whole mess. This caused all manner of chaos in the (very crazy, very rabid) user base. So the website would go down and when it came back up our faction's votes would have jumped several hundred while the other faction's stayed the same. However, it would always process my program's incoming POSTs.

Somewhat amusingly, the web server powering this website was underpowered and would stop serving pages (http GET) for up to a few hours at a time.

If a captcha was required, my program would very helpfully inform the website that yes, I had indeed typed it correctly (I promise!). I made a new program in C# that would do an http post to submit the vote on a timer. After studying the javascript for a bit I determined that the captcha was handled by a third party where the javascript would query if the captcha text was correct and the third party would respond yes or no. I was corralled into the voting by family, and after 30-60 minutes decided that this was really dumb, so I wrote a tiny webpage with a form with the key ids for what we were voting for, and set the page to refresh every minute, thereby casting my votes automatically.Īfter some click-fraud (related to google ad words, not my thing) the admin added a captcha to every 5th vote that one cast.

Only somewhat related, there was a 'voting' website once that let people cast a vote for something, up to one vote per minute.

Google recaptcha bypass 2016