Trump's online donation tracker is anything but live
Donald Trump's campaign website appeared to show a donation tracker scrolling across the top of the page Thursday, but everything was not as it seemed.
Rather than synching with live donations from supporters, it seems the tracker was actually generating names and amounts from an XML file featuring only around 500 people.
Twitter user @JackDanger highlighted the issue, posting a shot of the code behind the widget.
You May Also Like
To be fair, nowhere on the site does the tracker claim to be listing live donations, but for most online users these types of displays are associated with recent information, as in a stock or news ticker.
In an email to Mashable Thursday afternoon, @JackDanger (who identified himself as Jack Danger Canty, a software engineer in San Francisco) said he was poking around the two candidates' websites after Wednesday's presidential debate.
Both sites seemed very secure, he said, but Trump's "livestream" ticker seemed off. When he looked into when the file was last modified he found that the list of some 500 names had been looping through the site since Oct. 9.
Developers jumped on the apparent gaffe, replying to Danger's tweet that there was a "real lack of follow-through" and advising that using the JSON format would have been a better idea.
An email to Trump's campaign asking about the donation tracker and the list of names was unanswered by time of publication.
Funnily enough, it appeared by Thursday mid-afternoon the ticker had been removed from the site.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
