TGP Gallery Cheaters
 

Sorry to start another thread about it, but I need some feedback.

Yesterday I started working on a desktop application to check my TGP gallery list for redirections and popups, everyday gallery cheaters get more and more clever in their ways of bypassing bots through IP logging, useragent checking, and so on...

The application hits the gallery through a series of proxies and compares the returned results - problem being that from even the desktop it takes entirely too long to scan through 40k+ galleries. So I thought of this..

Distributed computing for checking gallery cheaters. Much like the google toolbar or SETI@Home webmasters would download a small client application for windows, upon daily load it would connect to the main server, download a tiny task list of a few gallery URLs that need checking - check them and return the results. With enough people participating we could build the most extensive, well checked TGP blacklist and hopefully make it not profitable for cheaters to redirect their galleries.

So what do you think, would anyone participate if I created such a system?

Write a script or an app to do it on a dedicated unix server. :2 cents:

Make something like this that checks only a few hundred/thousand galleries a day. That can be done rather easily, and it's enough to make sure that most cheaters get caught. Make a blacklist of ip/email/domain from cheaters, and they will run into problems quite quickly (ip and email aren't that bad for them, but buying 10 new domains a day gets to be a problem after a while).

I have many scripts that do this on Unix, the problem is they are finding ways around them. I either need to nail every single gallery 100 times through 100 different proxies or find a way to use a distributed solution to do it.

A single script on a single IP isn't a solution, it's being cheated as we speak.

I need to check not one, not ten, not one hundred... but all of my galleries.

It's not enough to make sure only a few aren't being redirected since most cheaters will submit through proxies and use multiple mailservers and domains to submit 50 galleries a day. I run brownie and a custom script to check the entire database of URLs all day long - the fact of the matter is that the copy of brownie is fooled by the IP logging cheaters and my custom script takes too long to scan the entire database.