Voting online has never been this easy when you have platforms such as Strawpolls, Facebook contests, or Twitter giveaways to express your opinion on certain things. However, question marks hang over the fairness of these polls to everyone. These question marks are due to some participants using automated bots, proxies, VPNs, tweaking cookies, and other
Voting online has never been this easy when you have platforms such as Strawpolls, Facebook contests, or Twitter giveaways to express your opinion on certain things. However, question marks hang over the fairness of these polls to everyone.
These question marks are due to some participants using automated bots, proxies, VPNs, tweaking cookies, and other forms to manipulate the poll results. This article will teach you the various tools, including proxies, to automate poll results.
Before I proceed, I would like to provide a word of caution. We never encourage cheating or other malicious acts when you’re engaged in online polls. The techniques here show the power of proxies and show the reader the reality of online voting systems.
So without further ado, Let’s jump in.
In the past, you could vote hundreds of thousands of times from the same device. But since this was undoubtedly unfair, poll creators limited the responses to a single IP address. Therefore the major poll websites such as Strawpoll implemented IP duplication checks.
However, tech-savvy Strawpoll users found a way to change their IP addresses using all or some of the following methods.
So now you have a clear overview of how to manipulate the votes by masking your IP address. While it is beyond the scope of this post to explain how to mask your IP address, here is an interesting read where you can learn more about how to do so:
How to hide my IP address without a VPN
However, I must make it clear that by merely masking your IP address from the methods mentioned above, you”ll not be able to vote an enormous volume of votes. At best, you”ll achieve fewer votes than your initial vote.
Using residential proxies in conjunction with a Strawpoll bot might be an excellent strategy for generating thousands of votes. Before we get into that, let’s look at some of the technical issues in voting websites that simplify voting manipulation.
Although we’re not living in the early days of building web forms, such as in 2005 or 2006, there might still be novice web developers who built forms with the GET method neglecting the higher levels of risk it involves.
When using the GET method, all the form fields that a user fills will be appended as a query string at the end of the URL. For example, if some website has an online poll and its forms action attribute is set to process_form.php, then this is how it will append the data:
somewebsite.com/process_form.php?orgname=onlinepolls&yourvote=true
Such a voter would navigate to this URL and click on the refresh icon in the browser tab multiple times. If the website tracks the cookies and IP address, it could delete the cookies and hide the IP address using some of the methods discussed above. Then every click of this refresh icon includes votes. Let’s hope for the best that online polls will never be built in such a manner.
Web forms that do not require you to sign in before you vote often depend upon cookies to verify that you don’t vote more than once. However, an innovative, tech-savvy user would clear the cookies on your computer and resubmit the form. They would repeat this process several times.
Google Chrome has an add-on to remove cookies from any website.
You can create multiple accounts for some polls that require you to sign in. This method to generate more votes can be daunting as it depends on the websites’ mechanisms to authenticate you. Most websites send an email to the user’s inbox to verify themselves with a link to the voting page.
In the below section, you’ll find out how email hacks can help you in such a scenario.
Certain poll websites do not require strict email confirmations. Then users would be able to exploit it in several ways using some email hacks. For instance, if you own a domain, you can create an alias email address for one email account.
On the other hand, users can generate thousands of emails for any Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, or email address with any domain name, adding a “+” symbol after the name just before the “@” symbol.
For example, if you have a Gmail account in the name of [email protected], then when you’re registering for a poll, you can sign in with [email protected]. This would still generate a mail to user James Thoma’s inbox.
Now let’s move on to the exciting bit of how you could generate votes on a large scale using voting bots and proxies.
Using bots in online platforms such as Strawpoll could automate the bot to do some of the voters’ actions. These are the bots signing into an account, then browsing around the poll and clicking on the vote or submit button without being suspicious. They would even like a post without causing doubts in the site administrator’s mind.
However, the bot alone would not produce productive results. It would help if you integrated them with proxies, as you shall discover in a forthcoming section. Platforms like Strawpoll can also ban bots if they find suspicious activities. Nevertheless, Starwpoll has never been successful at halting the bots entirely. It’s because automation experts have created bots in a way to be unrecognizable from browsers.
On the other hand, when you have a large proxy pool operating with a bot, it’s almost impossible to stop them.
Strawpoll bot is a voting bot for the Strawpoll developed in Python 3. x. They work well on Mac, Windows, and Linux. These voting bots operate on polls such as IP Limitation Checking polls or polls that limit the participants to one vote by IP address. They also work on No Limitation Checking polls. The only downside is that they are not successful on polls that have captcha protection.
For the bot to start voting on Strawpoll, you need to set up the bot. Some prominent bots you could find on GitHub are MoonfireSeco and Strawpoll bot by macropandolfo. You can set up the bot on your own. If you’re familiar with the Python programming language, setting up the bot is very convenient. Even those without much programming experience can learn it with ease.
So to set up the bot, you would need the poll id and the target value. Let’s say the poll URL you want your bot to vote on is https://strawpoll.de/text2. Here text2 is the id of the poll. Then to find the target value, you need to right-click the check box you want the bot to vote for. Then find the value that starts with “check.” For instance, check897654, which is the ID of the checkbox.
You now understand what automated vote bots are. Let’s look at the types of proxies you’ll need for online polls.
As I have mentioned numerous times in this article, most polls limit a vote per IP address. Therefore you would need innumerable proxies to vote multiple times. Another reason for using proxies is to bypass the geo-restrictions. Some Strawpoll polls are not available in certain countries; hence, if you reside outside of regions in which Strawpoll is not allowed, you would not be able to vote. However, with a proxy, you would connect to a country where Strawpoll is supported.
Thus the best proxies for online polls would be residential proxies.
The most apparent reason for the choice is that they are the IP addresses of actual residential owners. As a result, the poll website owners will not detect any suspicious activity, such as vote manipulation.
Out of the residential proxies, you would need rotating residential proxies, also known as the back-connect rotating proxies. Since you must vote multiple times, the rotating proxies will conceal your identity behind a proxy pool.
There are also pretty fast datacenter proxies. However, many polling sites can detect that you’re hiding behind a proxy. On the same token, VPNs might be suitable for one or two automated votes, but destination websites can easily detect them due to their redundant availability.
Besides, some websites, such as Strawpoll, have a robust VPN detection system.
Also, it would help if you never used public proxies with your bot because the IP address will be shared among several users, and most of them will go offline before switching your bot.
Choosing the right proxy provider is vital for selecting appropriate back-connect rotating proxies.
ProxyScrape is one of the most popular and reliable proxy providers online. Three proxy services include dedicated datacentre proxy servers, residential proxy servers, and premium proxy servers. So, what is the best possible solution for online votes using proxies? Before answering that questions, it is best to see the features of each proxy server.
Een dedicated datacenter proxy is het meest geschikt voor snelle online taken, zoals het streamen van grote hoeveelheden gegevens (qua grootte) vanaf verschillende servers voor analysedoeleinden. Dit is een van de belangrijkste redenen waarom organisaties kiezen voor dedicated proxies voor het verzenden van grote hoeveelheden gegevens in korte tijd.
Een dedicated datacenter proxy heeft verschillende functies, zoals onbeperkte bandbreedte en gelijktijdige verbindingen, dedicated HTTP proxies voor eenvoudige communicatie en IP-authenticatie voor meer beveiliging. Met 99,9% uptime kunt u er zeker van zijn dat het dedicated datacenter altijd werkt tijdens elke sessie. Last but not least, ProxyScrape biedt een uitstekende klantenservice en zal je helpen om je probleem binnen 24-48 kantooruren op te lossen.
De volgende is een residentiële proxy. residentiële is een go-to proxy voor elke algemene consument. De belangrijkste reden hiervoor is dat het IP-adres van een residentiële proxy lijkt op het IP-adres van de ISP. Dit betekent dat het verkrijgen van toestemming van de doelserver om toegang te krijgen tot zijn gegevens gemakkelijker zal zijn dan normaal.
De andere functie van ProxyScrape's residentiële proxy is een roterende functie. Een roterende proxy helpt je een permanente ban op je account te voorkomen omdat je residentiële proxy dynamisch je IP-adres verandert, waardoor het voor de doelserver moeilijk is om te controleren of je een proxy gebruikt of niet.
Afgezien daarvan zijn de andere kenmerken van een residentiële proxy : onbeperkte bandbreedte, samen met gelijktijdige verbinding, toegewijde HTTP/s proxies, proxies op elk moment sessie vanwege 7 miljoen plus proxies in de proxy pool, gebruikersnaam en wachtwoord authenticatie voor meer veiligheid, en last but not least, de mogelijkheid om de landserver te wijzigen. Je kunt de gewenste server selecteren door de landcode toe te voegen aan de gebruikersnaamauthenticatie.
De laatste is de premium proxy. Premium proxies zijn hetzelfde als dedicated datacenter proxies. De functionaliteit blijft hetzelfde. Het belangrijkste verschil is de toegankelijkheid. In premium proxies wordt de lijst proxy (de lijst die proxies bevat) beschikbaar gemaakt voor elke gebruiker op ProxyScrape's netwerk. Daarom kost premium proxies minder dan dedicated datacenter proxies.
So, what is the best possible solution for online votes using proxies? The answer would be “residential proxy.” The reason is simple. As said above, the residential proxy is a rotating proxy, meaning that your IP address would be dynamically changed over a period of time which can be helpful to trick the server by sending a lot of requests within a small time frame without getting an IP block.
Vervolgens kun je het beste de proxy server wijzigen op basis van het land. Je hoeft alleen maar de ISO_CODE van het land toe te voegen aan het einde van de IP-authenticatie of de authenticatie met gebruikersnaam en wachtwoord.
Related Reads:
https://proxyscrape.com/blog/how-to-make-a-proxy-checker-in-python/
Some of the Strawpoll bots that you looked into above have an option for configuring proxies, mainly in the form of a text file. The proxies are in the form of a list, as you need to have more than one proxy to vote multiple times. So it would appear that the target website as requests originates from several users.
After going through this comprehensive article, we hope that you have understood how online voting manipulation works. As stated earlier, our intention is not to teach you some malicious acts but to educate you on the flaws in online voting systems such as Strawpolls.
Therefore we hope that you”ll challenge the credibility of some online voting platforms using bots and proxies rather than break the system by unethical means.