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kevindosi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 16, 2006
191
0
Hey everyone! I'm participating in a video contest where the video with the most 'thumbs up' on youtube wins a trip around the world. You can see my video here if you're interested in helping me out with a thumbs up.
I'm here though to seek help from some savvy web people. A lot of the participants are cheating using sites like youlikehits and addmefast. If you don't know, these are sites that will give you hundreds of likes a day. It posts your video on the website and others click 'like' on it, but it only shows you one video at a time, or just a few. So I've been manually going through looking for videos that are cheating.
I'm sure there's an easier way to do this. Surely there's a way I can look at the source to find database of the videos or something? If I had a list of the URLs for youtube videos on youlikehits or addmefast, I could do this in minutes instead of weeks. Does anyone have any idea how I could do this? I'd really appreciate any help.
 
All these videos are on YouTube - you didn't make clear how a video becomes part of the contest, i.e. who or what site is tracking this with a list? If you had the list or some way to identify the participants, I'd consider writing a script that uses the YouTube API to query the number of likes per site from that list, and see if there is any field in the API that gives away the method the cheaters use. It's up to you to identify one known cheater to help you identify the method which shows up in the API query.

Info on YouTube API 2.0 for PHP:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_php

BTW, I hesitated responding because you shamelessly plug your own video in a support forum and ask for likes. Rubbed me the wrong way.
 
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