Listforge Stops Automated Cheating & Saves Hours of Work Per Day With DataDome

The Problem: Bots were undermining the credibility of rankings & draining company resources.

Guillaume Hausser, managing director of Listforge, manages his company’s entire technical infrastructure himself. He tells us that there has always been cheating in the server list market, but for some time now, automated voting methods have become too sophisticated to manage manually.

“I use a voting system to rank servers,” explains Guillaume. “Server administrators ask players to vote for them on our sites, usually in exchange for some sort of in-game advantage. The servers with the most votes appear at the top of the list. This visibility is important to attract new players, so there has always been a strong temptation for cheating.”

Players can vote for a server only once a day. At first, to get around this limitation, hackers would use VPN services and proxies to vote from different IP addresses. But over time, they started using bots to automate their fraudulent votes.

To stop this from happening, Guillaume first set up a detection system that he developed himself. He also created an alert function that allows players to report servers whose vote numbers don’t seem right for their number of players. However, this way of dealing with the problem had several drawbacks.

“First of all, it took a lot of time,” says Guillaume. “The detection system constantly needed updates, and I would have to go through the reports, talk with the administrators of the suspected servers, evaluate their responses, and eventually block them.”

Of course, the time spent dealing with bot traffic represented a cost, and it wasn’t the only one. Listforge uses a number of third-party services, including a VPN detection service that charges based on the number of requests. By increasing the traffic volume, bots were driving up the costs of these services.

And finally, the fake votes were threatening the reputation of minecraft-mp.com.

“If the rankings are unreliable, the honest players who use the service will lose confidence and go somewhere else,” says Guillaume. “Some people even accused me of working with the cheaters, saying that I had teamed up with some of the server administrators and was being paid to accept fake votes.”

The Solution: DataDome eliminates the need for manual detection & blocks cheaters on autopilot.

Identifying and dealing with fake votes could take hours and hours of work each day, up to 30% of the manager’s time. But the final straw was the discovery of an actual market for fake votes.

“It had become a business,” says Guillaume. “It was no longer a matter of dealing with a few server owners who were cheating on their own. There were real companies offering cheats with a price per vote, such as $5 for 1,000 daily votes, both on my sites and on competitor sites. That’s when I realized that I needed help and had to find a solution.”

His primary criteria for selecting a solution was a reasonable cost, smooth integration, and a very low false positive rate. “I didn’t want to change my infrastructure or rewrite the code for my site. Above all, I wanted a solution that wouldn’t affect my end users,” says Guillaume. “As unconventional as my sector is, there’s a lot of competition, and as soon as you make things harder for users, you lose.”

Having identified the most popular anti-bot protection solutions meeting his criteria, Guillaume put them to the test.

“Right away, I could see detection limitations in the other solutions I tested,” continues Guillaume. “They were almost exclusively based on checking IP addresses, and there were lots of false positives. As soon as I installed some competitors’ solutions, I’d get around twenty messages a day from users complaining about being blocked. With DataDome, I haven’t received a single complaint from anyone about being blocked by mistake.”

Another important detail is the ability to detect Headless Chrome, the ultimate solution for creating bots that mimic human behavior and the #1 tool for cheaters.

“It’s really frustrating because, on the one hand, Google works to detect bots with reCaptcha, for example, but on the other hand, they’ve created Headless Chrome,” says Guillaume. “Google is trying to provide a solution for blocking bots, but it isn’t effective against their own technology. For now, DataDome is the only solution I’ve tested that can detect Headless Chrome.”

He also appreciates DataDome’s onboarding process, which is optimized to ensure that the protection works perfectly from day one. A team responsible for integration and customer success provided him with support throughout the rollout.

“Where competitors email you some integration code and leave you to figure everything out on your own, DataDome has a whole team to support you,” says Guillaume. “I had several conversations with them during the first 3-4 months to be sure that everyone was going well, and I had people I could contact at any time. That was really impressive.”