The like button -- you've pressed it before. Sometimes I'll sit at my computer and press it for hours just to hear the funny fart noise it plays. But is there more to this button? Yes, indeed there is, and in this post I will be discussing my findings.
Right after this message from our sponsor
"Mmm I love to drink Coca-Cola®!"
Let's open up the browser devtools and poke around.
Upon clicking the fart button on a post, we see a couple errors appear in the console:
Seemingly, this action triggered an attempted http request, but it failed due to the server's CORS policy. CORS, or "Cross Origin Resource Sharing," is a web mechanism that allows resources to be shared from domains other than the one you're currently on (which browsers block by default for security reasons I won't get into). In this case, the current domain, talkhaus.raocow.com is trying to make a request to maker.ifttt.com, but the talkhaus domain has not been allowed in IFTTT's CORS policy.
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a service that allows you to chain triggers together from various APIs across the web. For example, you can create an applet that waits until a certain person tweets, and notifies you through an email. What we can gather from this attempted API request is that there were plans for some kind of off-site trigger to occur whenever the like button is clicked.
We can actually follow the IFTTT link and see the expected response for the "fart-button-pressed" webhook on IFTTT
According to the documentation, you can also pass a bit of data into the hook, as 3 values:
And digging into the network request for the attempted request, we see that there is indeed being data passed in the body of the request. This data includes:
- The giver/receiver of the fart
- The truncated beginning of the post that was farted
- A direct link to the farted post in the thread
This data could be technically used in any IFTTT recipe, but there's no way of knowing what the plan was. Perhaps raocow struck a deal with the NSA to give them the first few words of every post on the forum in exchange for $1/month on his patreon. But that's just a theory, a talkhaus theory
Don't forget to smash that fart button for more content like this