The day I noticed a competitor including a Javascript file from our website

I once worked for a company that was in the business of helping students consolidate their loans. We had a student loan calculator on our brochure site based on some JavaScripts we developed.

When looking through some Apache logs, I noticed traffic for the calculator’s “.js” file with an HTTP referrer of our competitor’s website.

Quickly, I navigated to their site to check it out and indeed, in their source code, was a call to our JavaScript file for THEIR version of a loan calculator.

Oh, the possibilities

This is the sort of discovery I didn’t realize I would be so excited about. After 5 minutes of intense thought, I decided to move our company’s real “.js” to a new URL, and on the original one, I added just a few new lines.

I popped open an alert box with a message that simply said “Click here to try our updated calculator.” followed by a document.location to our calculator’s homepage.

Gosh I wish I were a fly on the wall at our competitor’s office the next morning.