Let's have a conversation about bots, shall we? I've seen a fair bit of discussion on Discord lately, along with a fair bit of consternation ("Why would anyone need a bot?", or "Why doesn't Caspian just ban bots already?" and that sort of thing), and maybe we can come together here and clear a few things up.
definitely not an internet bot despite first impressions
I'd like to start by clearing up a series of discord community misconceptions: a "bot" is a common feature of the internet, and is not, by itself, "cheating" or a "DDoS". Their creators are not by default "sneaky" or deserving of an early death.
Let's go to wikipedia for a moment here: a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet ... More than half of all web traffic is made up of bots.
So, if over half of internet traffic is bots (or automated scripts), what are some useful things people do with them?
So with all these useful functions that bots can perform for you, why does there appear to be a stigma against their use?
So there's good and bad. How could these bots be used on the CoE website specifically?
In this group I am including things that fall within typical or routine bot usage across the internet, which should not be expected to produce undue load on a website.
In this group I am including things which, while they may fall within typical or routine bot usage across the internet, could also either produce undue load on a website or are intended to subvert some "spirit" or game mechanic intended by the designers.
I think that the purely bad applications of bots are clear enough (and rare enough) to not warrant further discussion. I do hope that all of the above serves to inform a few people about the sorts of things that bots do that are potentially useful (even if one doesn't necessarily agree with the need for a bot to perform a simple task). If you're knowledgeable on the topic, or if you have questions, I hope you'll add to the conversation below!
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Nice work, I do not know much about this kind of thing, thanks for taking the time to explain it.
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Casp banned bots, but he only made the announcement in discord, so its not official.
He also said he would ban accounts of people that were using bots. Is you contention that he would be unable to do so because he only made the announcement in discord?
Posted By Mandalore at 08:20 AM - Wed Apr 17 2019
He also said he would ban accounts of people that were using bots. Is you contention that he would be unable to do so because he only made the announcement in discord?
His contention is that information coming from the Discord is always treated as transient and changeable, and until something is posted to the forums it is not official. Caspian has stated this to be the case many times. So this should really also be announced on the forums to become official.
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Posted By mickdude2 at 05:26 AM - Wed Apr 17 2019
Casp banned bots, but he only made the announcement in discord, so its not official.
He also said that the announcement was "fair warning." That bots have always been frowned upon, but mostly ignored. And that accounts that used bots thereafter would be permabanned.
I think anyone who takes that risk on the argument that it is "unofficial" because it wasn't posted on the forums is taking a crazy and avoidable risk. Bots, like bacteria, can be benign. Most bots, like most bacteria, probably are. But if there are malign bots causing serious problems, and it will be difficult to tell them apart from good bots without taking undue time, then it is best to just ban bots -- just as it makes sense to use an antibacterial soap in the bathroom.
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Hmmm, I wonder what the name of the channel he made the announcement was as well. It couldn't have been #offical_updates could it?
Posted By mickdude2 at 05:26 AM - Wed Apr 17 2019
Casp banned bots, but he only made the announcement in discord, so its not official.
Our assertion that Discord isn't an official medium is so the devs can have casual conversation with the community, brainstorm, test out ideas in real-time without everything being perceived as final. This is known and well understood. It should also be understood that there's a difference between casual conversation made in #coe-common-room and #official-updates.
We were undergoing a perf hit on the site due to a convergence of various bots hitting the site, scraping data and doing other stuff all at the same time. The announcement was done on Discord so that I could respond quickly in informing the, close to, 4,000 people who were online that we were no longer going to tolerate individual bots being ran on the site.
We will be updating the website's Terms of Use, but that requires a bit more work as it involves our legal team. So in the interest of expedience, I used the fastest method to reach the largest number of people that I could - in the official updates channel.
Please don't intentionally mislead people. I know you're a smart guy, so you're able to differentiate what's an official distribution channel on Discord and what isn't. So coming on here and telling people it's unofficial, and implying they should disregard the warning as a result of that, is setting other people up for failure. Something people in this community should strive to avoid, outside of the game.
Cool. I believe that was on Monday? Can we just get this response copy/pasted under News and Announcements?
Edit: Nvm, I got ya.
Posted By mickdude2 at 08:26 AM - Wed Apr 17 2019
Casp banned bots, but he only made the announcement in discord, so its not official.
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great quote regardless - +10 kudos
I understand that a discord announcement was needed to expedite the process but perhaps a calmer head should be used before threatening banning in said announcement etc. particularly when bots have been largely ignored in the past.
As for changing the ToS to cover this side of the equation - that is a step in the right direction.
Also - Good original post!
Turns out I was right lol. Calmer head woulda avoided making a major announcement when the issue was something else entirely.
By the way, Caspian's bot-intolerant post was made in official updates.
So people were scraping the coe website? How do you stop a program from doing what I believe amounts to find and store operations on a website? I am not the best at programming but do you just limit the speed at which an IP can access different pages, I didn't even know that was possible. Also I also noticed the site crashing a lot last week and the week before, was that the reason?
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The reason turned out to be a bug/error in processing very large number of tokens in a player's account. Every time they checked their token inventory, the website crashed.
Bots appear to have had nothing to do with it.
