Is it worth it? To get rid of bot accounts
Surely there will be something similar and equally irritating for the bots, who will think, better to pass than try to solve it.
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There are many ways to handle bot entries if you care enough about it. Annoying non-bot users shouldn't be one of them.
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While captchas pretty much solve themselves nowadays - I would suggest to do it once. Just log everybody off and force everybody to log in once with captcha. Just to see how many bot accounts will have temporary shut-down xD
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lol I need to see reaction of guy/girl who have 100+bots here.
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no matter what you do cheaters will always find a way past and around.
every X amount of time they ban a lot of the auto join bots here
thats about it
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Let's do it once. It will work some time before asholes will update their bots to solve captcha :)
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Let's not, please.
I get wanting to reduce the bot proliferation in this site but I don't think that making the user experience more annoying is the right way of doing so. Like, they're gonna find a workaround anyway, and at that point what would we have achieved? Scaring away some of those who don't use bots and can't be bothered to put up with captcha. Nah, let's not.
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you know what, from now, I suspect everyone who is against this idea, even though it has its drawbacks, try it, then we'll review it
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Ah, thanks for the clarification.
And I don't run bots here, don't need to. Why would I bother to learn how to use bots when I've been visiting this site almost every day for the past decade? This place is my version of social media at this point :P
I simply don't want captcha to be implemented here because they can be really annoying to do on the phone, and I frequently visit this site from there. In fact I'm writing this from my phone.
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Can't we just enjoy the puzzles and riddles that users make as sort of captcha instead? Feels like those are win-win. There are giveaways with few bots, and giveaways for the masses.
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If it's Recaptcha V3, I wouldn't mind. Anything else would completely kill the website
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Just make your giveaways Level 6+ and bot problem is solved. :P
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You are wrong, there is not a correlation between higher level and not using bots/autojoiners. Also, veteran members know better how to cheat the system.
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Welcome to Steamgifts, this discussion is in the wrong category, you should move it to:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussions/bugs-suggestions
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not with every single entry, but maybe twice a day or something,
and not with giveaways ending within 30 seconds lol
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not with giveaways ending within 30 seconds
Though bots could then avoid the CAPTCHA by entering giveaways only in the last 30s.
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then we could look at the data to capture all the bots lol
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There was one bot purge in history of SG. Believe me - CG has ways to tell what accounts are using bots already. The fact that there was no second bot-purge so far means that he is happy with bot users here.
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many of my winners are bot users and i dont even do that many giveaways, i think it's a custom now whenever i finish a giveaway i blacklist the winner because i see them online for days entering giveaways before they claim the keys on the weekend.
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https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/h9RxE/autojoin-suspensions (cg's thread 6 years ago)
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happy cake day,
sorry just saw your comment,
maybe in 4 years on the 10th anniversary we will get a 2nd ban wave, considering steam itself only does it once or twice every decade.
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Thank you :)
Yes, maybe to the next anniversary :-D
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I dread the day- probably soon- that we will be needing complex and weird captchas, like answering existential or personal questions; and since AI will answer those simple questions it would then follow up with 1-2 more with tricky follow ups to catch language models.
Future fears aside, on one hand id like captchas on SG, on the other i would hate it...
BUT i can see it done in a less annoying way
1) Optional per giveaway creator
An option to opt-in or out of asking for it.
2) They dont appear per each GA, but once in X time (handled by the site)
Once every 24 hours, or 12 hours something like that. Its like a temporary pass each time a captcha is answered- GAs that opted in would check for the pass, if present nothing needed, if experied captcha shows up
A better implementation would give different passes depending on how many GAs a user enter or their account lvl- shorter vs longer timers... but that would likely be more of a headache to implement
Or something like that could also be put on GA creators- like 2-3 options of 'severity'. The most severe could be 1 hour or something like that
Anyway i imagine any implementation would be hard on the site, and its the kind of (not really) 'solution' that annoys everyone to hit the fewer bad actors. I assume a minority of users are the responsible for bots (but likely each have idk how many bots- dozens, 100+? idk)
Id be willing to have some annoyance to help fight it. Sure this kind of 'solution' is very weak- nothing stops the botters from manually answering captchas- but imagine having to every hour answer dozens+ captchas for the bots to run for only 1 hour by themselves... i think it could be effective- in REDUCING at least.
I hate captchas but even a single timer of 1 hour i wouldnt mind. I enter GAs in batch anyway so answering 1 captcha ONCE to enter a couple of gas seems doable to me- later that day answering another... not that big a deal frankly
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I disagree. Yeah theres been solvers for captchas for awhile now- existing solutions doesnt mean all bad actors or bots use then. Maybe im wrong and theres massive large scale botting on SG from experienced bad actors that make sizeable profit from it... but i dont think thats the case. Id guess theyre very simple bots used by some users who probably dont even code.
I bet the majority botting on SG wouldnt PAY for humans solving captchas or some premium monthly AI to spend however many tokens doing captchas- heck id bet some botting wouldnt even know how to implement/plug those services, and theres the added cost. Cost is a very relevant topic here. Majority of bad bots on the internet(as a whole) are doing whatever theyre doing for PROFIT, and are run pretty much on a business mindset- whatever costs they have being worth the gains at the end.
SG currently is a very easy low cost target so even if profits are chip money the low bar may be worth it- but if they need to put some extra cost to run on sg... would they? Theres more profit botting on games for sellable item drops for example. Even if botters are doing it for cards maybe to sell on steam, the moment theres a price to bot on sg it would make more sense to spend that same money botting elsewhere where theres more profit to then buy cheap steam keys on batch.
Acessibility is a thing. Even small obstacles to entry put a lot of potential bad actors away- btw the current AI surge have show just that, a bunch of stuff wich was already 'easy' to do are now increasing, not because it was hard before but because it wasnt as convenient as just using AI now. Upper Echelons video fail to recognize that- even on major platforms, that 400% increase in botting is from the bigger bad actors who arent stopped by captchas... but without any barriers those numbers could double.
To give an example, i dont know anything about bots for sites but ive done one type of scrapping in the past- ive used programs to scrappe/download from some sites before, youtube videos, twitter and i think instagram once or twice. Oh and pinterest too. I never repeatd the process, on the occasion i wanted to do that i searched whatever was current for scrapping (generally some app on github) ran it once or twice and done.
Last time i tried... i couldnt. Most werent working and the one that did barely got anything before being stopped by anti bot measures
Im sure theres ways to overcome such measures. But would i, a very average basic user put the time, effort or costs to overcome that, and for so little(in my case no profit, i just like to save art references)? I just moved on.
Im probably far from the average internet user but frankly the world is large, hackers-botters arent the majority of people on the internet(their bots are) but people like me probably far outnumber said power botters. And im sure captcha reduces some of that... no captchas are like opening the floodgates, the lowest bar of entry(none at all)
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For short, try the idea if its total trash and absolutely no help to the community then, the puzzles is our last resort
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For now. If botters here would go as far as AI for captchas... the hardest part would be plugging in an AI api to whatever theyre using for the bots. Once that api plug is achieved whats requested of the AI could be anything- and id say things like jigidi or quizzes would be solveable by AI as well.
Only the most complex puzzles mixing things up would be untouchable by bots, for now at least. Sure someone could use an AI to help figure each step of a puzzle but i cant see current or next up versions realizing what all the steps are or following then for long
But of course thats assuming some level of skill from botters. Maybe some will do that but id guess half or more currently botting wouldnt go the extra lengths vs captcha. Anyway if the argument is they can solve captchas automated then most puzzles are also moot.
Truth be told even complex puzzles go only so far- all it takes is for the bot hoster to solve the puzzle personally once and then share the link with however many bots he uses. In that sense puzzles are like worse captchas in the sense theyre more a barrier for humans then bots... but i bet puzzles have less bots, for the same reason i defend captchas- the annoyance, convenience. The extra step needed is enough to bar a larger number of bots...
Id say only a big GA (some brand new AAA title) behind a puzzle would likely be interesting enougth for bot hosters to solve then share the links... but look at that- a puzzle requires solving only once. An captcha in the site would ask for manual solving OR paying/advanced bots for every single bot.
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you think too much, improvements require steps, even spontaneous ones
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As per usual, title
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