thenamelessone

August 23

There’s an anonymous chat site in my country that’s somewhat popular. It is very bare-bones, there isn’t any special function, you just set your gender, your partner’s gender, and you get paired with someone. You can’t even register or set a username, and the design is also very basic. It’s a bit surprising that so many people use it. It must’ve been the first such site in my language, and it seems people don’t need a more complex one, so this remained in use. It hasn’t changed much over the decades, and there’s no maintenance, no moderation, no bugfixes. There are ads, so the site must provide a little bit of passive income for the owner, enough to leave it online, but I guess there’s not enough potential in it to make any development or fix anything.

I’ve used this site sometimes over the years, and I got to know its flaws, vulnerabilities. I’m no hacker, but I know some programming, and I’ve always been interested in web development, so sometimes I studied how this site works, just to learn from it. I discovered many flaws in it which can be exploited. I even wrote some programs that take advantage of these flaws. For example I made a modification, so that I can get a chat partner sooner. As expected on a site like this, there are many times more males than females, so it takes a long time to find a female partner as a male, but I found a way to shorten the wait time. I also wrote a program that can see other people’s chats.

I also wrote a program, that searches for many partners simultaneously, starts a chat with them and sends a few initial messages. But that was based on automation and used the existing site, which made it slow and inconvenient to use. I had an idea to write my own client, which should be much faster, and I could do more with it. Today I did that. It was easier than I expected, I already finished it. And indeed it is very fast, it finds many partners in little time, and it is easy to use.

This program could be very useful to me in the future. With it I can reach many people quickly, and I have many project ideas, where that’s a useful thing. But there’s a problem. I shouldn’t have wrote this program today. It’s of no use to me right now. Instead, I should be working on getting everything in order around me, and then start doing my project ideas. But I haven’t done anything useful in a long time. I was in the mood to do some programming, that’s why I did it today, but it wasn’t really useful, I have much more important things to do.