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Book'em Dano
2002-12-18 19:24:48
Something fishy is going on with Moz and W3W. In a matter of 1 second they make 5 plays between them.  All simple.  All in a row with Moz ending up the winner.  Is this the results of bots?
Book'em Dano
2002-12-18 19:29:21
Its moved to Board 4 now only its using Opera 6 and Moz.  No human can play that fast.
Book'em Dano
2002-12-18 19:38:48
They chat messages in Board 10 now claim its a script.  I like Moz to but its win stats are not real everybody.
Stephen Brooks
2002-12-19 08:30:53
It's stopped now.  I think most people with scripts are sensible enough only to run them long enough to show they've done it, and then let the game continue normally.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Book'em Dano
2002-12-19 17:28:52
Probably so, but I'm sure it also explains how Moz got between 400 to 500 wins in the last 24 hours. 

The wins seemed to be coming in as fast as I could refresh.  The only way to stop it was to try and play in the corner the script was setup for or to lock the board if possible.

When I started doing that, the script was changed to reflect Opera as one of the players (losing of course) so I had to change to another browser.  When I did lock another board (2) before a script was functioning I had one player get mad at me for doing so as he said he was trying to write a bot for Moz.
kpu
2003-01-09 20:12:56
What about rate limiting?  I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but nobody is going to play within 1s of a previous move and this would stop the simplest of bots.  Then again, adding sleep 1 to a shell script defeats this protection.  At least it would be easier for someone to block a bot like this.
Stephen Brooks
2003-01-11 09:52:46
I could even put a "sleep(1)" at the beginning of my script if the time since the previous move was less than one second.  However I think that would upset some people because the person who clicked first wouldn't actually get their square placed if a second person clicked say 1.02 seconds after the previous move.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
kpu
2003-01-11 17:56:48
Let me clarify: wait one second between moves from one IP.
kpu
2003-01-11 18:06:18
Here goes an odd idea: real players will load at least one page between moves.  Some bots, particularly the kind that have two IPs under the same control, will not load a page between moves; they will simply get the page to make the move.  Just block IPs that don't do this.  Another way to implement it is changing the links to make a move each time i.e. attach bork=rand and require that the bork be from the link.  However, the second one will casue problems with multiple windows.
Klaartje
2003-01-12 05:56:40
Wouldn't the latter force players to refresh by using the link?  I would not really like that.

It would, however, disable Opera's auto-refresh option Wink
kpu
2003-01-12 06:29:33
I meant the link in the buttons to move.  Refreshing would get those regardless using the link to refresh.  Just check that the button was pressed by verifying that the part attached to the URL is the same as one given in the most recent refresh.
Stephen Brooks
2003-01-12 17:27:17
Annoyingly, though, the bot could just get the correct bork string out of the HTML by finding the links.  I suppose this would make the most basic sorts of bot impossible, but ones like C4Bot (that scan the page and play intelligently) would still be able to play with fairly small modifications.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
kpu
2003-01-19 12:13:27
Check out board #2. I just played wget and it was making moves every second.  Nobody can play that fast and think at the same time.
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