Internet Babel

Recently I cheated 2 articles to the front page of Internet marketing social networking site Sphinn. Basically the business man’s Digg.

I’m not bragging about it or saying you should go around doing the same. But the following is just an explanation of how I did it.

So, basically the loophole. Very basic loophole I noticed with Sphinn was that they do not require email verification after completion of sign up. This is almost a rule of thumb now so I don’t know why they don’t do that. So I figured it would be very easy to quickly sign up with multiple accounts and use fake/random emails as they didn’t need to be verified anyway.

I also noticed it takes, well, I read that someone else noticed it takes 20 sphinns to get to the front page. Which is true. Now I already had a real account there which I used for real submissions, honest submissions and I had submitted about… 30 articles maybe. Obviously you automatically sphinn an article when you submit it so this meant I needed to make 19 more accounts to achieve 20 spins with an article.

So, first I signed up 19 new accounts, each from a different IP (via an IP changer) with random emails I just made up on the spot and account names which I noted for reference and one password for all of those.

Next I submitted a real article with my real account, signed out and signed in and out of my dud accounts sphinning my article each time through a proxy. I also sphunn other people’s articles as well as sphinning theirs first sometimes so that if any editors suspected, they would see I was sphinning actively and randomly. But I didn’t really care about getting caught anyway, I just wanted to see if it would work.

Which it did, first time I did it – article got to the front page and got sphunn about another 20 times. But I’ll tell you what, traffic was seriously poor from that. I know Sphinn isn’t huge but I was expecting a decent amount of traffic, not really worth it. But I was chuffed to see it on the front, I guess no editors noticed as it was about 5am when I did this.

I did this again about 2 days later, but this time it got viewed by a lot of editors who must of been getting suspicious about how fast it was getting sphunn haha. And obviously it wasn’t hard to figure out then as all my sphinns came from accounts with dodgy emails and no profiles, all signed up on the same day and all having sphunn my article.

But I never planned to go on a super exploitation of Sphinn I was just a bit confused as to how such an upcoming social networking site could be cheated so easily and they never even thought of this possible, obvious exploitation.

Now… I was lazy which was the reason I got caught because realistically I should of took my time getting those accounts established somewhat by submitting articles on those accounts, befriending myself, sphinning other people’s articles a lot, putting up profile pictures and filling out all info as well as using real emails. But can you imagine how long that would of taken! not that bothered about getting banned though, but Sphinn, sort yourself out, this exploitation was a very blatant one which shouldn’t be slipping past you!

By the way, I originally got this idea after reading Pwning Facebook: How To Think Like An Uber Affiliate on Shoemoney’s blog. If you read that the guy explains the iMacros which is basically a Firefox extension which allows you to record browser actions which can then be played back. My original idea was to record myself signing up and sphinning etc without going into detail. But I realised manually was actually quicker if I just did it as fast as I could rather than waiting for the thing to play out the actions. Plus I had to keep changing the email each time as well as entering a verification code so… manual was the way to go for this.

So, that’s it. Sorry I can’t link to the posts but since I’ve been banned now obviously all my submissions have been removed, but I’m sure some big people on Sphinn may have noticed them or… the editors if you ask one of them.

I don’t go around cheating things normally, I just thought I’d share that little story of mini-exploitation.