Topic awaiting preservation: causing hits by ping?

This is gonna sound a bit strange but I thought, I'd ask anyways:
What is the best way to ping a server (or a certain page on it) to cause hits on the counter?
I've created a frameset which includes the approproate page in a frame and is set to <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0" /> which works fine, but i have to wait until the page fully loads everytime until it is refreshed again. Now remember this is only supposed to cause hits on a counter, not visitors. Is there a better way to do this maybe by PHP or VBScript?
Don't get me wrong, this is not to cause mayhem or trouble, we just want to cause a few hits to a friends website counter ...



<´¯`·.¸ Patric ¸.·´¯`>

Why would you want to do this?

Now, to answer your question, you can simply create a PHP script with "for" loop that will connect to the appropriate web site and increase hit counter. There's one thing - most modern counters have IP locking, so all hits from the same IP will be counted as one. Each request (from for loop) would be stored in server log file (and that's were you can increase hits), though...

Why would i do this?

There's a guy over here in Germany who has a strange arrangement with the girl of his dreams. She won't let him into her pants and therefore they've made an agreement. He promised to set up a website to make her "famous". In return she will sleep with him by the time the counter on the website hits an amazing 111.111.111 hits!

Read about it here: helftkai.de
(Site is in german but still worth visiting! Check out Julias gallery!)

Since it is currently at about 1.300.000 a few friends and i thought of helping him out because at the current rate of hits it will be years before the kid gets to score. However since this would have characteristics of a DOS attack we already scrapped that idea. Thanx for your help though....

<´¯`·.¸ Patric ¸.·´¯`>

He he heeee... Very *interesting* concept! Although, if Julia is really serious about this, she should look at web server log file to get real number of hits, because "Julia - O - Meter" is seriously broken (it increases *a lot* on each page refresh) and not to mention what you & your firends wanted to do with counter, heh...

I know thats why it is so simple to manipulate the counter, hit refresh and you'll add a hit!
By the time we started this morning, there were 1.200.000 hits, so i guess we added a few...

<´¯`·.¸ Patric ¸.·´¯`>

I actually don't know if some of my friend's machines are still running overnight with the script. Some said they'll leave work machines running.... we shall see tomorrow...

[This message has been edited by patric design (edited 10-11-2001).]

Heh, he should just make the number of hits proportional to the amount of time passed since a certain date. Then he could actually make it hit 111,111,111 at the date *he* wanted. =)

(To avoid using simply a linear function, he could make good use of sine and cosine waves to make it appear that people aren't visiting at a perfectly steady rate.)

In case you didn't notice, Kai said that Julia has a friend that checks real statistics for helftkai.de domain, so fake increasing of Julia - O - Meter is really pointless...