seen on http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20071112 (see comment #9) I suppose the post will be erased as it promotes "breaking" distrowatch working by adding bots, statistics are already too much biased IMHO to add the complexity of removing bots, which represents extra work for ladislav. 9 • Voting Bot #2 up and running (by WebBot2 on 2007-11-12 11:54:02 GMT from Mexico) I was amazed how easy it was to set up a DW voting bot. Anyone can do it with Linux. I'll show you how below. The only rule is "Only one hit per IP address per day is counted." No problem. I tested my voting bot with some low hit distros so I could verify the impact. For 7 days I saved the 7-day hit score. Then I picked five stable distros and switched on the bot. The bot was set to vote about 60 times per day. For the distro IPCop 7 days of the "7-day hit score" before the bot was very stable 70-68-68-68-69-67-67. After turning on web bot the daily reading of the 7-day hit score was 67-74-83-90-98-111-119. Using the 7 day score meant it takes 7 days to see the full impact of adding the web bot votes to the normal hit score, thus the steady daily increase. The bot is working undetected. IPCop's 7-day ranking also improved each day: 83-74-67-62-58-56-54 The web-bot test given in the October 22 DW news showed these hits per day: openSuSE.. 1970 – 1022 – 1632 Fedora...... 1395 – 787 – 1259 PCLos ....... 3757 – 684 – 3685 There are three important observations: 1 The middle day is slow because viewers use the Page Hit Ranking (PHR) list as an index. Without an index, visitors viewed information about the latest releases and left. Providing news of new releases and planned releases is DW's real contribution. 2 For PCLos the traffic fell 82% and their ranking changed drastically. The PCLos web-bot uses the PHR list to vote about 2700 IPs per day. Without the PHR list the web-bot was exposed and disabled. 3 Votes were still recorded. This means clicking on the PHR list is not the only way for a web-bot to vote. My bot also voted by typing in "Musix" for the distro. The results were 7 days of the 7-day hit scores before web-bot 70-69-69-74-73-71-70 and after the web-bot was activated 69-78-87-94-100-108-115. My web-bot also tried to vote by clicking on Knoppix in one of the ads - this did not work, those votes were not counted. Here are the details of how to set up your own DW voting bot. You can use that old PC in the garage or just have multiple user IDs logged on your PC simultaneously. Multiple IDs let you run the bot totally in the background while doing your usual tasks. The background bot will keep running until the PC is turned off. With Ubuntu you only need to install the packages "Privoxy" and "Tor". See http://corvillus.com/2006/09/18/how-to-set-up-tor-and-privoxy-on-ubuntu-linux/ for pointers on the setup. In Firefox just two add-ons are needed: iMacros and FoxyProxy Verify that FoxyProxy is working by viewing your IP at a site like www.ipchicken.com. Check with FoxyProxy off and again with it on using Tor. You will see different IPs. In iMacros create a macro that: TAB CLOSEALLOTHERS goes to www.DistroWatch.com clicks on the distro(s) you want to promote (better yet type them in) Save the macro. From iMacros right click the macro and add as bookmark Set type to "Local: Add reference" Tor gives you a new IP every few minutes. Your web-bot can vote again every time the IP changes. Close Firefox and create a bash script to run: firefox macro-bookmark & sleep 960 (wait 15 minutes) Use loops and nests of loops even multiple user IDs/sessions simultaneously. Run firefox with the "&". This launches it in the background so the script continues timing. Sometimes Tor uses very slow routings and the macro times out. Restarting Firefox with "&" ignores any timeout errors and starts over with the new IP. I love Linux. I started the web-bot and it ran perfectly for a week with no need for human assistance. I only stopped it to select new distros to promote. DW will now black list the IPs that my web-bot used for voting. This is of trivial impact as Tor keeps giving new IPs with only 5% repeats. Also to win this bot game will take thousands of IPs not just the couple of hundred that are getting blocked. For more IPs visit FoxyProxy pages. Be creative - this is a competition. My crystal ball says Slackware, Mephis and PC-BDS are about to experience a "continuous rise in interest and curiosity generated by you - the DistroWatch reader". "If a distribution is good enough to get there, so be it!" LOL - - WebBot # 2