Best way to punish Plagiarisers? Vote them down!

Okay, so this is not an article with wrong intention or something. This shows you the importance of two major things when you build a Web Application:

  • Server Side Validation.
  • Targeting Right Audience.

Let's start with defining the term:

Plagiarism: The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

Motivation

Well, for doing any activity, you need a motivation, right? Today, a few hours ago, I saw this on Meta Stack Overflow: codexample.org appears to be replicating Stack Overflow. I was super pissed off seeing that someone is scraping the contents and making money out of it, which is totally bad for content creators like us.

I thought of teaching them a lesson. So I tried checking their site's vulnerabilities and found that those idiots allow users to vote up and down without registration. Not only that, they do not store or associate the vote with that particular user as well. This means that, when you reload the page on your browser, the vote disappears and you can vote multiple times.

Also, they are not even maintaining sessions, which is the basic thing any kind of web application requires to do when you are making a Web 2.0 Application. Considering above facts, I decide to vote the questions down. I accidentally discovered this bug when I reloaded the page and found my vote missing and surprised that I was able to vote a single question multiple times.

Keep voting down their questions and I would say, what these people are doing is totally illegal! Let me know your thoughts in the comments.



comments powered by Disqus