NGL's click counter is FAKE.

Please, don't build your sites like this.

Dated:
Tagged: unclicking, counters, nodejs, programming, ngl

warning: some profanity is used in this post

I was messing around with NGL.LINK and noticed a little counter:
Webpage showing a checkbox and "Sent! 👇 532 people just tapped the button 👇; Button labeled: Get your own messages; Hyperlink labeled Send another Message"
This counter intrigued me, so i popped open inspector, and what do you fucking know, there's no data. This is the code snippet we are interested in:

  setInterval(() => {
    let clickCount = parseInt($('.clickCount').text()) 
    clickCount += Math.floor(Math.random() * 5) - 1 
    $('.clickCount').text(clickCount)
  }, 800)

The setInterval line is the start of a recurring timer, if you look to the end you'll see it says "800", so every 800ms we re-run the code. What does the code do though? It first, pulls in the text of the .clickCount HTML item, which is the counter, then it uses parseInt, a function that, if a string is only a number, turns it into a proper integer so we can perform mathematical operations on it, after that we save it as clickCount (a variable) in the next line down we increment clickCount (the variable) by Math.floor(Math.random() * 5) - 1, what exactly does this mean? First, we run Math.Random (order of operations and all that jazz), this throws an output like this:
Math.random in firefox console, yielded 0.19502641876331384
We then multiply that by 5, so it atleast, some of the time is at-least 1, we then floor it which basically strips away the decimal values, and then subtract by one at some points, which could theoretically be dangerous if it ends up being a 0.9999 or whatever which means it would take an item away, finally we write this value back to the element, rinse and repeat. I leave you with one thing:

An Addendum: Unclicking?

I noticed this code has the possibility to SUBTRACT from the counter, so i ran it manually, interestingly NodeJS and my browser (firefox) reported different answers, see for yourself. Ignore the void function wrapping it in node, for some reason node likes printing extra garbage and i had to void the trash.

NodeJS

Script in nodeJS showing it switching between -1, 0, 2, 3 when using random and a bit of math.
Node seems to have a habit of rolling zeros and negative values, which when negatives are rolled, it would seem like a user "unclicked" the button.

Firefox

Same script in firefox only yields positive, nonzero numbers

Ok, but WHY THE FUCK IS NODE ACTING DIFFERENT TO FIREFOX??? Now I gotta test it in Chrome >:3

Addendum 2: Electric Boogaloo (2026-02-23)

Just found a backup of my old site and had to put this post back up.

Also fuck you if you have any of the following on your site:

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