New Facebook Cloaking Script

Posted on: July 2nd, 2008 by Nick

So the Facebook interns finally got wise to the old method of cloaking and have begun testing the ads both with and without the traditional intern referral url. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen the following requests occurring sequentially:

[offer url], 76.102.66.165, 09:48PM, 2008-07-01, http://harvard.intern.facebook.com/intern/ads/review.php
[offer url], 76.102.66.165, 09:48PM, 2008-07-01,

So it looks like the interns are checking to see if people are cloaking against the common intern.facebook.com style referrals. One easy way to mitigate this is to just log the ip of the interns on their first visit and compare against that for future requests. Not foolproof, but should work pretty well for the time being. The code to accomplish this can be found here.

Nothing groundshattering, but for anyone that needs a quick php script to plugin to existing systems, this should work for you. Additionally, if anyone wants to share the lists of intern ip addresses that they build up, feel free to post in the comments :)

Posted in Facebook Social Ads |
Share This Post: Digg | del.icio.us | Netscape | Reddit | Technorati

No Responses to “New Facebook Cloaking Script”

  1. Nick Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 1:34 am

    Ya…the other option would be to look for the first visit to a particular offer and assume thats an intern. Will only work for new campaigns though. My hope is to build up a big enough list of intern ips that after several dozen campaigns it will be comprehensive. Although, it only takes one missed cloaking attempt to get an account canned :/

  2. Nick Says:
    July 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    Ya…the two main reasons I’ve heard people getting banned for is cloaking and submitting too many TOSed ads. I usually don’t cloak maliciously either, but you never know what they may consider foul play.

  3. Nick Says:
    July 6th, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    @Rage9 - Ya, but this might be more useful if you want to launch of a few dozen campaigns at a time and don’t want to wait around for the 3+ hours that its been taking interns to approve ads. You’re way will definitely work though if you’re in front of the computer and only have a few campaigns going.

Leave a Reply