So I got an email yesterday from he-who-shall-not-be-named recommending that I just turn off cookies. Well, duh, that makes things easier. So I tried it in both Firefox and IE and it works brilliantly. You don’t have to do anything but just keep on clicking. But then, I thought, if I can just keep on clicking then certainly I can write a script to do this for me. Citysearch made it easy, too, using Javascript to submit the survey results rather than a backend script. Amateurs. So that’s what I did. I wrote a script.
I’ve uploaded the page so that you can use it, too. It votes for my recommendations from my last post: Ken’s Place, Bahn Cuon Tan Dinh, Autentica, and Siam Society. It creates a new window for each of the votes and then closes the windows after the voting is completed. Over and over again. You can just let it run and go do something for a couple hours.
CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE CITYSEARCH BALLOT STUFFER
Here are some tips to make sure this works:
1) Turn off cookies.
Internet Explorer: Go to Tools->Internet Options. Click on the “Privacy” tab. Click on the “Advanced” button. Check the box to override automatic cookie handling and then select “Block” for both first and third party cookies.
Firefox: Go to Tools->Options. Click on the “Privacy” icon. Click on the “Cookies” tab. Uncheck “Allow Sites to Set Cookies”.
2) Delete cookies. I talked about this before. Or just google it for your browser. But if you’ve already voted today, you will need to delete your Citysearch cookies or use a different browser.
3) Turn off pop-up blockers. This will be too unique to describe here, but you should check programs such as McAfee and Norton Internet Security. They often have toolbars in your browser. Also Yahoo and Google toolbars often are set to block popups. This may be as simple as clicking a button to allow popups on this page or pressing the CTRL key while clicking the link for the ballot stuffer. Also, if Internet Explorer warns about active conent, make sure you click the warning to allow the active content.
If you’d like to play with my code and alter which restaurants you vote for, following is the script…
It’s pretty simple. The following goes in the head between script tags:
function ballotStuffer () {
winRefA = window.open('http://portland.citysearch.com/bestof/vote/5?chad=35886542&raid=1','stuffedballotA','');
winRefB = window.open('http://portland.citysearch.com/bestof/vote/18?chad=35886542&raid=1','stuffedballotB','');
winRefC = window.open('http://portland.citysearch.com/bestof/vote/10?chad=41896120&raid=1','stuffedballotC','');
winRefD = window.open('http://portland.citysearch.com/bestof/vote/35?chad=41901062&raid=1','stuffedballotD','');
winRefE = window.open('http://portland.citysearch.com/bestof/vote/51?chad=41828910&raid=1','stuffedballotE','');
setTimeout("winRefA.close(); winRefB.close(); winRefC.close(); winRefD.close(); winRefE.close(); document.location.reload()",10000);
}
Then, in the body tag you simply put this:
onLoad = "javascript: ballotStuffer();"
There you have it. It’s not tight, brilliant coding, but it took me less than 10 minutes to create and now I can go get a bite and come back knowing I’ve helped re-balance the Citysearch “Best Of”. Anyone with a little knowledge of Javascript can easily re-write this to vote for whichever restaurant they think is deserving (or, as I said before, insanely undeservering — either works). You just have to right-click on the vote link in Citysearch and copy the URL/Link. Then, in each window.open statement the important bit comes after “vote/”: the number indicating which category and the number of the “chad” which indicates which restaurant.
Have fun sticking it to the man. Rock the vote!
