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987? I just took a look and it was 970 ...

Hmm, something very fishy going on here ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Double post.

AquaBid has now dropped to number 6. Numbers are looking more normal. Hopefully a one-off aberration?


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Well, they're at it again already. It's Monday morning here and AquaBid already has a vote count of 122. Obviously they are cheating the system somehow, but I doubt there is anything that can be done, or is there??

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

You know, another fish site that I'm familiar with got busted for cheating a while back and got a strong warning from Aquarank. They used to be #1 or 2 all the time with suspicious vote totals, and now, I don't think they crack the top 25.

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~~Melissa~~
"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."

Aquabid: In 232 Out: 28

Everyone elses in and out count are reasonably close, it does seem strange there is such a difference.

Cheers
TW

It's now in:460, out:44.

And once again, their tally looks suspiciously close to the tallies for the remainder of the top 25 all added together. Tally for everyone from #2 to #25 comes to 473.

A quick look at the source reveals nothing unusual - it's a PHP scripted page, so the meat of the calculations are performed at the server end. To find out if there is any code causing this anomaly would require snooping the server to find out if the script that handles the back end of the operation was a legitimate one. Trouble is, PHP scripts running on servers usually do so in conjunction with the Apache web server running under Linux, so there will probably be some interesting security features resident on the server to prevent such snooping (and detect attemtps to do so) - and that's before we delve into the world of editing the Linux kernel to add 'custom' features of this kind.

So if AquaBid are being 'helped' to achieve their ridiculous total by program code that is adding other sites' votes to AquaBid's total, finding this out will require some serious detective work. Anyone here got acces to some military computer hardware I can borrow for an hour or two?


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

C'mon, Cali, if you had access to some serious hardware, would you waste it on trying to figure out if some fish website was cheating, or would you do what I've been expecting you to do for a few years now and just take over the world?

Joe Potato

Good Point Joe. Hey, has anyone tried to contact Aquarank to see what is going on?

"Talk is cheap. Action can be almost as affordable"

Take over the world Joe? I have bigger ambitions than that.

Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Double post.

This is now getting ridiculous.

AquaBid: In, 1,002, Out, 93.

For some reason I'm reminded of the lyrics of The Black Hit Of Space by the Human League ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Looks like someone's been messing with the code.

Just tried to vote via AquaRank and got a splash of error messages all over the screen, namely:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 272

Warning: mysql_select_db(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 275

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/www/aquarank/in.php:272) in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 182

Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 272

Warning: mysql_select_db(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 275

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/www/aquarank/in.php on line 186

Hmm ... interesting, n'est-ce-pas?


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002