No one likes a cheater and most of the time, they get caught. With the explosion of location-based social games such as Foursquare and Gowala, the cheaters have found their way around the loopholes to rack up points and badges like they were going out of style.
Today, Foursquare via their blog, announced today that checkins outside the immediate vicinity of the venue in question will no longer net points, badges or mayorships.
The company wrote:
Some of you may have noticed that we rolled out the first version of our “cheater code” - an attempt to catch some of the folks that are checking in from their couches to steal mayorships. Since last summer, this has been one of our most requested features and has been one of the trickiest to get just right.
Long story short, Foursquare wants to give you points where you check in, not where you "say" you check in. Their secret weapon: GPS. Foursquare didn't divuldge what tools they are using to prevent cheaters from stealing mayorships from hard-working social adventurers, but did say that, "the idea is simply to not award points, mayorships, badges or venue specials if it looks like you didn’t really earn them."
So far so good Foursquare says.
In other Foursquare news, the company also announced today that they have launched a Firefox plug-in that will allow users to utilize the service just about in its entirety.