Surfing Around the Traffic Exchanges

Whenever a traffic exchange has a contest and there is a monetary prize there will inevitably be cheats waiting to cash in and claim the main prize. I do not think that there is one exchange that is totally immune to cheating whilst surfing. A smart programmer can create a surf bot for any exchange if he or she wants to win the competition.

As a surfer, I have competed in surfing competitions and I have won some of the competitions, fair and square. On at least one occasion I just had to surf and surf to beat the competition, I would come on and the other person would be ahead, so I would do as many pages as possible to get and stay ahead of that person. This is the fair way of competing in a surf competition. However, some people are not content and they try to create bots so that they will end up as the surfing competition winner. In a lot of cases they do not claim their prize – and by not claiming the prize these cheats have spoiled the competition for everyone else.

However, this is the beginning of the story and not the end of the story and yes I do have quite a few opinions on the matter. Surfing cheats use up the credits of other surfers, and this is not fair to these other surfers. It is possible for a surfer to protect him or herself in an exchange where one can change the number of times that a url is seen each day. I use this form of protection in the exchanges where it is offered. However, if I have no control over the situation then my credits are used up as fast as I can earn them. I do not want to waste my hard earned credits on surfing cheats.

From the other side of the coin, there is the measures that should be taken by traffic exchange owners to catch the cheats. Having to click on multi icons such as in StartXchange is not a good enough protection. I doubt that one can even call that particular surf bar a reliable measure for cheat protection. Some have expressed concern about using the hover technology claiming that it is open to the cheating, especially where there is a single button, but again this is not necessarily true. It all depends upon the other cheat check measure that have been put in place.

A good example of an exchange that has cheat checks in place is Lords-of-Traffic. This exchange has been criticized by at least one other exchange owner because it uses both hover technology and a single button. What the critics fail to see is that there are plenty of other checks in place and the cheats are caught. For example, if a surfer has found more helmets than pages surfed, then that person is a cheat. What the person has tried is to constantly refresh the page. He or she is caught out by the other members of the exchange when the helmet count for the weekly helmet competition is way too high. Other examples are the links for bonus credits as well as text and banner impressions, plus the Halt Page. I am not the only surfer who can miss these links – it can happen at least once. All it takes is for the surfer to be tired and mistakes will happen. However, if the surfer has never clicked on the links then it is more than likely that he or she is using a bot. A daily log is being kept and checked by the exchange administration. Those who constantly fail to click on the links will end up being suspended.

The purpose of writing this is to encourage both surfers and exchange owners to have their say about this very important issue of cheating. Therefore I want to encourage a discussion of this very important subject so that both the surfers and the exchange owners can come up with a best practice to try and stop the cheats.