ujjwal-kr/ip-upvote

Reverse engineering Urban Dictionary upvote system

ip-upvote

Demo: http://ip-upvote-demo.herokuapp.com

I reverse engineered the UrbanDictionary upvote system, in golang. And I don't really care what the original upvoter is built with.

Why Do I do this type of stuff ?

• I love to waste my time.

How the UrbanDictionary upvote system works ?

• UrbanDictionary is a very popular website where anyone can post definitions/meanings of words/phrases.
• The correct meaning selected by the number of upvotes. (People can flag sick meanings but that is a different thing)
• An Example.

So What's Wrong ?

• The system allows the users to upvote with their IP addresses.
• This results having a single upvote from your network, and nothing more.

I noticed this when I tried to upvote a question with an Incognito (private) window on my laptop. Then I tried to upvote with my phone, (which was on the same network as laptop), but my upvote was already registered. Which may sound like a great idea but is mostly a failure, just like my life.

As a wise man once said,

Saving critical entities with IP addresses is a bad idea because IP addresses will mostly be dynamic and a new one can be obtained simply by restarting the router or toggling the airplane mode on a mobile device, leading to multiple entities, then to confusion of the highest level to a literal spam as now you can vote for a word 30 times a minute (by everytime restarting the network) but a user was only supposed to do once.

This works because of the fact that the IP address of a device changes after restarting. Hence, the user is allowed to upvote multiple times which is worrying.

My Project

This project is built with GO and SQLite which I have never used together before for a demo app. Maybe I used them as I like to suffer. But I'm happy with the functionality.

• My project is the clone of the exact same system but has much worse styles because I suck at styling
• You can add items and vote for them once.
• But if you restart your router or toggle airplane mode, you will be assigned a new IP so you can vote for that again, lol.

Please don't do this to the main UrbanDictionary website, I will soon reach out those guys about this issue

Some real threat

I'm just saying, I think someone can use bunch of automated VPN proxies to make literally thousands of requests to the upvote system. And making it undetectable will be a walk in the park.