Secret Crushes

[bryant]

The LJ Secret Crush meme is fairly vile, since they collected a bunch of information and are now selling it and maybe you didn't want to let that person know you had a crush on them? Too late now.

rowyn passed on a great idea from peganthyrus. She suggested that we pick random users and fill out crush info for them, poisoning the database. That's not bad.

This works on my system. Maybe it'll work on yours. At the moment it spews the HTML for the return page to standard output, because I couldn't be bothered to parse through it and summarize results. There is no error-checking. The code is low-quality. You will need the CPAN modules HTML::TokeParser and WWW::Mechanize.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use HTML::TokeParser;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use WWW::Mechanize;

$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)");
$ua->requests_redirectable([ ]);

$random = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD => 'http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml');
my $res = $ua->request($random);

($user = $res->headers->header('Location')) =~ s#^.*/(.*)/#$1#;

if (! $user) {
        die "Couldn't get random LJ user.\n";
}

print STDERR "Crushing ", $user, "\n";

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$agent->get("http://euthanize.us/memes/secret-crush-meme/");
$agent->form(1);
$agent->field("username", $user);
$agent->click;

@types = ("Never Crushed", "Secret Crush", "Public Crush", "Ex-Crush");

$agent->form(1);
$crushform = $agent->current_form;
@friends = split(/,/, $crushform->value("friends"));
for ($i = 0; $i <= $#friends; $i++) {
        $crushtype = $types[int(rand(4))];
        $friendfield = "friend" . $i;
        $agent->field($friendfield, $crushtype);
}

$gender = (rand(2) > 1 ? "Male" : "Female");
$agent->field("gender", $gender);
$agent->click;

print $agent->content;

Comments

Re:

[bryant]

Yeah, I'm not really a big fan of the whole "It's OK for us to do this because you should have assumed the worst" argument.

Hey -- it's OK for me to poison the database; the Secret Meme folks should have assumed that I might do something they dislike!

And no, the original Secret Meme did not warn anyone that they would be selling your answers.