How to win in Vkontakte repost contests?

I wanted to know if it’s realistic to win in the repost competitions on VKontakte.

How to do it? The answer is obvious - you need to participate in all contests and according to the theory of probability, the more contests, the greater the chance to win at least something.

The idea is simple, we take the vk_api module for Python and the official Vkontakte API documentation. We send the request:
')

pool.method('newsfeed.search', {'q':u'   <_>'}) 

and repost through wall.repost all that we found on our page and enter the groups using the groups.join method

What came out of it, what problems I ran into, read under the cut



1) Are you a bot? - we say that there is no and add a big pause between reposts

 time.sleep(120.0+random.random()*200.0) 

The first week, once every few days, I still had to manually prove that it was not a robot, then the checks stopped.

2) Spammers often use the words "competition", "repost" and "gifts" for their black deeds; I had to make a black list of prohibited parts of words:


3) On the very first day, it turned out that the maximum limit of VC on the number of records on the wall was 150 pieces.

I had to expand the filter with parts of those words that were not very interesting to me, but actively appeared in the search:


4) Many contests asked to fix the repost on the page, otherwise they will not give away the prizes. They will not give, well, okay, expanded the filter for all results, where additional actions are required of us:


5) The results of the competitions were also issued in the search, so they also excluded them:


6) After the filter has grown significantly, the number of reposts has significantly decreased, we had to add another query for the search “Repost contest gifts Russia”, but this did not last long.

Then I added a list of hundreds of "gold" groups that add repost contests several times a week. They can be easily found by the presence of the words “repost” or “free” in the name of groups.



And every hour all their posts containing at least one word from the white list began to repost:


It seems that everything worked - only contests were added to the page (with rare exceptions), the bot entered all the groups mentioned, and there wasn’t any winning ...

Well, of course! Contests are new, you just have to wait ... meanwhile, the page quickly turned into a garbage dump ...

In the second week I was already desperate, but I decided to leave the script still to live in the crontab, “I don’t ask for bread.”


I got my first win in 3 weeks! It was a certificate for an increase in lips, because Neither I nor the acquaintances needed this, had to refuse and add the “increase” to the black list. A week later, another prize - movie tickets, but in another city, again asked to replay.

The script began to bring 1-4 winnings per week. The winning subscriptions, tickets, courses and services in other cities immediately asked me to “replay” the prizes (clothes, toys, trinkets, cosmetics, etc.) the organizers sent by Post of Russia, after a couple of months the postal workers already knew my face and gave parcels without checking passports.



At the moment, for a period of just over three months, the script has made more than 15,000 reposts of contests. It turned out that Vkontakte has a limit on the number of groups - 5000, we had to add a way out of groups with old contests. Almost every day scammers write to me about winning iPhones, for which you only need to pay for delivery and spammers, as I consist of thousands of groups of various subjects.

As a conclusion, I can say that yes, winning repost contests is absolutely real, most of the prizes are cheap Chinese souvenirs