i just talked about this on twitter but i’m still laughing at it, so you guys get to see it too. so if you don’t know, adoptable pet sites often let you stick a picture of your pets in your forum signature or whatever, and the pets then grow from clicks or image views. the site gets new visitors, your pets grow, everyone wins.

well, one game i used to play ran into a problem. one user knew the owner of a porn site, and convinced them to stick a pet image on the site’s homepage. they made it unobtrusive by sizing the pic to 1×1. that user ended up getting banned from the game after they accidentally almost ddos’d it.

but since it’s not embarrassing enough to get caught using a porn site to get ahead in a casual pet game, neither the porn nor the near-ddos was what actually got them banned. the owner of the game reasoned that since the image had been made too small to see, their game wasn’t benefiting from the advertisement, so the user was banned for exploiting the system.