Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl • Hacker News Board

Re: Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl

#21

Post by ivankirigin » Sat, Aug 21, 2010, 11:17 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #16

ivankirigin wrote: post #9

It is so much easier than that. http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/973558561/im-mayor-of-faceb... 58 23 * * * curl -u CELL:PASS http://api.foursquare.com/v1/checkin.json -d vid=VENUE

Missed the point, I think. The extra code is perturbation to avoid automation detection. Your line is regular, and can be easily programmatically filtered out.

There is certainly a lot more in the post, and I encourage everyone to read it.

My point was that you don't need to do as much to get results. Also, I'd been doing this since last fall IIRC. Those at foursquare didn't catch it or don't care.

I also think there are some interesting things cheating bring out in any open platform. Either foursquare enforces rules about checking in with data they validate, or they allow input from an API by third parties. They can't really prevent cheating and keep the platform open. I can certainly get around any filters put in place to detect these things.

Re: Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl

#22

Post by ivankirigin » Sat, Aug 21, 2010, 11:34 PM UTC

jorgeortiz85 wrote: post #12

Disclosure: I work at foursquare, but my opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Foursquare is a game to be played with yourself and with your friends, and was designed to encourage you to get out and explore your city, helping you discover new and interesting things about the world around you. Sure, you can cheat, but that's kind of like stealing Monopoly money from the bank in a game with your friends. Yo…

You're competely correct. It became an open joke at facebook about my cheating - it wouldn't make s sense to keep it a secret. It was also in line with some past shenanigans there: there are some really, really amazing scores in Bejeweled Blitz & Rockband.

Re: Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl

#23

Post by WiseWeasel » Sun, Aug 22, 2010, 12:21 AM UTC

Volscio wrote: post #18

WiseWeasel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't use it, as none of my friends use it. But my point is that since you don't really use it either, except to keep a record of the places you've gone to, instead of its common usage of meeting up with friends, you may not be the best reference for how the service should be working. I don't think the single-player version of Foursquare is very emphasized; it's more of a multi-player-only game.

Just because your friends aren't on it doesn't mean it's "single-player", since you have visibility with other people who live in your city -- I have in fact met people solely because we friended each other or traded mayorships through Foursquare. Also I'd question how many people use Foursquare to meet up with friends. Are you saying that friends meet up at locations not because they set it up via email or Facebook…

I'm saying that you see when a couple friends check into a social meeting location, and say, hey, that location is near me, and seems like a good time, I think I'll check it out... Or maybe you ask yourself where everyone is on this Saturday evening, see that all your friends are checked into a local party spot, so you immediately know where the action is. I don't see using it as a way to make new contacts through leaderboards and achievements and such, but I'll admit I'm not all that interested in meeting new people through such a geeky venue. Might as well go all out and join a D&D club at that point.

Re: Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl

#24

Post by toffer » Sun, Aug 22, 2010, 12:58 AM UTC

Back in February, Jim Bumgardner wrote up his experiments with gaming Foursquare:

"Eventually I amassed a huge number of mayorships, spread among multiple accounts, including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal"

http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2010/02/mayor-of-the-north-pole...

Re: Gaming Foursquare with 9 lines of Perl

#25

Post by bconway » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 1:57 AM UTC

10ren wrote: post #7

bconway wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I was thinking. One of the first things that comes to mind when starting designing a new web service in my head is some minimal spoofing prevention. At least make them go to the effort of running a debugger.

I sympathise, but I note that that wasn't the first thing foursquare did, and they've made a very popular service out of it, whereas you (I assume) and I have not. When we don't have the resources to do absolutely everything perfectly, how do we decide what to spend our time on, to what standard - and what to let slide?

I was referring to time spent on implementation details, not designing a product. In my book, good programming practices and having a popular service are not mutually exclusive.