[John]

Originally Posted by futureal

Ah, the joys of LoadVars.

I eventually stumbled upon what is probably a similar system, although I never implemented it in the old arcade. Doing it this way should discourage all but the hell-bent "I must cheat, no matter what!" people. It can still be done via memory editing, but they need to have an intimate knowledge of the hack and, when it comes down to it, I think very few will exploit it. Still, the admin can always check the game durations as well.

Good job with the challenge system, it's a cool feature!

Nope, not loadVars - sendAndLoad.

Ordinarily, it doesn't take memory editing to cheat. If you know the source code (i.e. you've downloaded it from vb.org), you can easily see which actions to send your faked POST data to. Indeed, if you didn't have access to the source you'd need a packet sniffer to check to see what data was being sent, and then replicate it.

However, this still isn't the system that I use.

The v3 Arcade's games "talk" to vBulletin, vBulletin measures the time between each communication. If that time is greater than 5 seconds, it's very likely that someone is trying to manually send the data through a script. I.e. they prepare the data to send, send it, and start preparing the second batch of data. There are also a couple of basic calculations which make it more difficult for someone to cheat through firing off scripts with POST data.

In essence, the only way to cheat is to write a program to send and receive data the data rapidly, process is correctly, and send it back in the correct format. Only a very sad individual would be prepared to go to those lengths!