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Comment by vanadium | Hacker News Reader

I remember the AllAdvantage.com cheat as well. It became so popular to game that one that not only were novel tactics like yours employed, but automatic mouse hijacking apps for Windows made some headway for those that didn't want to sit and click ads ad nauseum.

I may have made a quick buck on this back in the early 2000s.

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click ads ad nauseum

There is a browser extension that does this for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611594

It was removed from Chrome's appstore, so it must be very effective... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228 ...and shows very clearly whose side they're on.

"So, an advertising company that used to have a motto about not being evil, but abandoned it, built a web browser."

Realistically that wasn't going to end any other way :)

On site owners site? That extensions likely punishes owners of sites visited by you by suspending their ad network account for click fraud. I can see how that might be considered harmful.

AllAdvantage was great while it lasted. My method as a highschooler was a free mouse trembler app, coupled with 4 rotating Geocities sites I made to auto-forwarded to each other in a loop every 45 seconds.

There were programs that would run up the 40 hour weekly limit in seconds. I'm assuming AllAdvantage had no real sanity checking when receiving data, which to my eyes means they deserved to go out the way they did.

It was a game. The sanity checks were added and workarounds were formed...

lol I remember AllAdvantage; I had a set of programmable Legos and I made a little jig that would sit there and spin a wheel under the mouse ball back and forth.

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