avi has been watching 1 YEAR PERFORMANCE VIDEO for 49 days, 9 hours, 35 minutes, 59 seconds.

via: 1 YEAR PERFORMANCE VIDEO

People have been cheating on 1YPV (I’m not going to call it a hack because the ways to game the system were known and left there from lack of belief that anyone would waste their time doing it and laziness). Not Avi, the top viewer, he and the rest of the top 10 (RSS) seem to be playing by the rules. (I’ve been trying to keep everyone honest.)

At first, it was really easy to cheat. You could input anytime you wished into the database via a certain page. After a few people took advantage of that, I took that page offline.

Then, it was harder to cheat. You still could, but it took more work. Then, someone cheated in the new, harder way. Argh! I decided to fix that hole.

I wrote the fix. Tested the fix (thx Owen). But didn’t implement the fix until this morning.

I noticed someone was rapidly rising through the ranks and sure enough, they were incrementing the DB time much quicker than the folks playing by the rules. So I zeroed their time in the DB and implemented the fix on the server.

Now, hopefully, there is no way to cheat. Perhaps there is, but I haven’t figured it out. Both cheats thus far were known to me, but I didn’t fix them until they were taken advantage of. If you figure out a way to cheat now, please let me know.

One other note: I don’t really care that people cheated. But it wouldn’t be fair to the people playing by the rules to let all the cheaters take over the top 5 list and the top 10 RSS feed. Plus those lists wouldn’t reflect the actual usage of the piece and become worthless and I think they’re a very valuable part of the piece. permanent link to this post