Fake page visits

15,000+ fake views on ChallengePost Project

Posted on by sahildua2305

Hey there!

I hope you enjoyed my previous posts in Technical Hacks category.

Starting with the project of the week – GitHub Profile Scraper. So, as I was done with my latest project GitHub Profile Scraper a few days ago, I decided to post it on ChallengePost. GitHub profile scraper basically, helps you to get details of someone’s GitHub profile and show the information in an elegant way!

As soon as I posted the project on ChallengePost, it really got kind of sudden attention from ChallengePost community and even the co-founder of ChallengePost liked my project and started following me. I was delighted by the immediate attention that I was getting for this (self-)project.

As said by the great men – “The more you get, the more you desire to have!”. Yes, I was not different in this sense. I started looking for more and more visitors to my project and more followers on ChallengePost.

Then an evil idea came in my mind! I thought of automating the project page views as I noticed that they count different page views from same IP address as different page views. This reminded me of how easily this is achievable using Python. So, I opened my weapons i.e. Python IDLE! 😀

I wrote a simple python script within next 10 minutes and ran various versions(keeping time delays different) of it. The result was an increment of almost two thousand page views. My project was soon trending on top on ChallegePost. Soon after that, the co-founder Nealrs came to know about this(probably) and stopped liking the project. But I kept on running the script with increased frequency of the page visits. At a time I was sending almost 20 page requests every seconds. The only thing I was waiting for was a server crash, which didn’t eventually happen and page views on the project were soon 17,000+. Yes, an increase of almost 15,000 page views.

The best part was yet to come! Soon, the other co-founders of ChallengePost came to know about this and instead of taking any action against me or my project(I was actually expecting them to remove my project after this), one of the co-founders, Brandon Kessler (@bkessler) tweeted me something like this –

This absolutely made my day! Then, I replied back with a polite, humble tweet to assure that I will not continue that.

FYI, the project was trending on ChallengePost for almost 3 days, which is really a big thing. Today, it has more than 20,000 page views. 😉

You can view the project on ChallengePost here: GitHub Profile Scraper | ChallengePost

For feedback/suggestions/feature-requests, tweet me @sahildua2305 #FakeViews

DISCLAIMER: Since, I am making this trick public, ChallengePost staff may have problem with it. So, I am removing link to the script. It’s simple enough to write it yourself. 😉