Here's a memory. Back sometime in the 90s I had a site called "10 free pics". It was getting about 10k visitors/day circle-jerk. One day I was thinking about how the top 50's worked and realized that if I sent a lot of traffic at the reset that I would end up high on the lists. So I set my alarm to (I think) 3am (midnight PT) and set a huge font size = +4 link to adult origin on top for an hour. After the reset I was about number 10 on the list and that traffic came in and went out to other toplists. The next night I stayed up and redirected the entire front page to adult origin and ended up number one. Then I did it with Cliffies. The site site went to 100k visitors/day in less than a week. Of course, I did it for a bunch of other sites too and then all the consoles (like Robin's). I must have been pushing 300k CJ traffic/day within a month.
I did this for weeks on end. Eventually I had a list of all the reset times and would keep setting my alarm to wake up at odd hours and do it again. Then I started to burn out so I called a friend of mine from college and asked him how I could automate it. He taught me how to use the crontab to move files around at different times. Pretty brute force but it worked. (He also said we could cheat by simulating "hits "and I said I didn't want to do that - that getting caught could ruin once's rep.)
I was talking to "Fantasyman" that week and he asked me that week where I was getting so much traffic. I told him I had always had it.
One night Spanker called me at 3am and asked me what the hell I was doing. I must have been tired. I told him. Within a week he had a site with more traffic than me. He trumped me with "10 teen pics". Either he told others or others figured it out because within a few months everyone was doing it.
Years later I saw a traffic trading script that had a feature to send traffic at scheduled times.
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