make it private ga, and put the link in forum thread like this
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considering Jatan11t told us that he made a private GA and didn't post the link. and still had one entry, this doesn't help anymore
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Isn't necessarily due to bots, though. Only coincidental bruteforcing. :P
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I saw someone wrote there is new script that auto-enter even hidden giveaways, so invite only lost its point.
When we made event, few days ago, I had 5 diferent giveaways opened and refresh pages second when they start, and saw entries of same person, only way is that you blacklist them like I did :)
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Aren't whitelists and groups the ultimate barrier ? Even against bruteforcing ?
I know it's sad to cut out the majority of SG users but if bots are your problem, isn't it the solution ?
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i´m new to here, so dont have much experiance.
i would suggest, to make "invite only" and link it here in the forum. so most bots should not enter^^
hmmm, as usual: to late :/
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+2
It can be a couple of easy stuff, such as what is your real name (if it's shown on your Steam profile), your most played Steam game or some easy filter like that
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The best way to avoid bots is to "hide" your GAs behind some wall. Forum GAs will cut down on most bots, but there have been talk about bots able to pick up links found on the forum as well (has this been confirmed?). Having anything that hides your GAs from these automatic entries and you'll be safe (having a "puzzle" with a simple question that anyone can answer should be enough).
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It's hard to confirm something I guess, but there are rumors of it and there are plenty of entries like the ones described by the OP in those as well.
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Some people just write "thanks" on everything, and don't bother reading the descriptions. What would be telling is if someone has a long list of GAs with "thanks" messages posted on a whole bunch of them within a very short timeframe.
But I take it that no-one has at least been able to find an actual script out there in the wild that absolutely confirms their existence?
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Most of those kind of scripts are not public, as far as I know. I guess we could try some kind of test, for example: 2 private giveaways for the same game, one just as a link, another with some kind of very easy puzzle and see what happenes.
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Even if it's something obvious as "/XXxx?/ ?=X"? I think even bots can do that XD
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if you give "?=X" it probably won't affect - but then again - such a string cvan be pulled by a script as well and bot may be able to enter this GA :D: if you make it ?=second letter of my nickname however it may already restrict some very few users from entering - the ones that don't speak even a little bit of english, who got explained how site works and join since then without understanding anything they read - these may simply don't understand what "second letter of my nickname" means - it doesn't mean they are bots thou ;p
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Any generic website crawler would have no issue finding links on this website. Obfuscating the link is the only defense if you are worried about this kind of thing. Making a specialized crawler to decrypt the outliers is possible, but it is also a case by case situation. Meaning you are past the point of diminishing returns.
So yes a simple puzzle would be enough. I just wanted to clarify since yes a bot can do what seems obvious to a human, but only if it was programmed with that very specific situation in mind. Change to "/XXxx#/ #=X" and that type of bot is going to break. So now you program to look for that specific pattern right? What if someone uses a different pattern though? You are right back where you started.
~source: I write regular expressions all day.
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well, I just made a private ga on my skyrim thread and it was hidden with the usual [] (link) tag, after a couple of minutes there was already an entry by someone with a terrible ratio (>100 won and 4 sent). No comments on the thread nor in the giveaway. I see it a lil bit suspicious 'cause until I made the link much more visible the entries were just 4, for hours.
This proves a point? of course not, but gives the idea that there are bots sniffing up links from threads as well ^^
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look what answer the first one.
there is no way for it...
http://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/lkwl57T
i can look it up.
only thing is private invite only group/whitelist GA
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I wonder if someone has cracked how the URLs are generated, or if it was just a lucky guess. Considering how many different combinations there are (the URLs are case sensitive, so there are (26*2+10)^5=916132832 combinations), it would probably be far more effort than it's worth to have something that just goes through all the different combinations. It's possible that it was just someone being lucky though, who tried to enter another GA and it just so happened to be close to the one that Jatan hosted.
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well, in theory, you can check all the GA that ended and remove them from the list.
and it could have been someone lucky, heard that google also sends you to the private GA with a proper search
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dunno how to quote, but he said
"Edit: I asked him and it turns out he was bruteforcing combinations for a puzzle. I'm guessing one of Mecorx's."
It seems like a lucky guess. I also created a prvate giveaway whch was supposed to be whitelist and didn't share the link and nobody entered.
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it may be hard to confirm, but as there are ninja bots (confirmed at least on steam discussions but if a bot can recognize steam key on steam discussions I don't dsee why it wouldn't be able to do so in forums - and talk about ninja bots on SG is around since I joined 3 years ago) I see no reason why there would not be forum GA bot - it's actually extremely easy script to make - dump a site for each discussion every hour or so, pull all strings that have /giveaway/ in them and voila! ;p
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Very simple puzzle on http://www.itstoohard.com/ which would give the solver a link to the giveaway.
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I agree with the honeypot. Its a nice way to filter off bots and people who want free games but won't even take the trouble to read the message from their benefactor. Heck I'd say make a bot that creates a true giveaway with a proper warning and blacklist all the participants. If enough people used it it could eradicate the problem (for a while) ... OR ... wait till admins stop being click whores and add a decent captcha system for winners.
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There's even speculation now that bots are just scouring the entire 900+ million code combinations for giveaways to enter, so you may never be able to prevent it entirely, but agree that a simple puzzle, whether on itstoohard.com or just directly in the description (/aY3?e/ ?=P) would suffice to prevent a bot from reaching it without brute force.
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let me start with YOU!!!
just kidding :)
So, the OPs original goal was to give games without level restrictions, but prevent bots from getting them. I don't think blacklisting everyone achieves that, since they wouldn't be giving the game to anyone in the end. Whitelisting on the other hand - that does meet the stated objectives, provided of course that they don't add any bots to their whitelist. :)
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Let's say the link to your invite-only giveaway is:
http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/sWGfC/gauntlet-slayer-edition
You create a forum post, or a cheap public GA even, to act as a launching point, and put in your description something like this (if you want to keep it obvious and not a real "puzzle"):
/sWGf?/
? = C
If you're worried that people won't know what to do with that, you can add a link to "the guide" so they learn how to work other puzzles on the site, or just give instructions directly.
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If they are programmed to do so. I'd say probably not.
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You can't ask a reroll simply because you suspect that person used a bot.
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"seem to be" is not a reason for a reroll. Heck being a bot is not a reason for a reroll afaik. And to accuse someone of anything you need a proof, not just accusation that someone seems to you as something. What if I made a support ticket that "kn00tcn appears to be a scammer" - would you be ok with receiving a perma ban based on that? Probably not. Then why ewould you be ok with approving rerolls without an actual evidence?
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rerolls arent bans obviously & are nothing close to being worse than a ban, why exaggerate like that?
do MOST entries appear suspicious? no, most are regular users & winners usually end up being fine, but i do see many repeat users with the same repeat text in just about every giveaway i check that also ignore the creator's messages & never reply to replies of their repeat text, therefore these few users are suspicious at the very least (check the steam profile of course)
now the alternate philosophy is that some people are busy & need to quickly enter some giveaways, it's still eventually a human behind every account, so maybe all accounts should be treated equal
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but it was even said by support in the past - bots are not against the rules (especially as it's really hard to judge if it's a bot or just user not reading descriptions - and not reading descriptions is also not against the rules) so even if you had a proof not just suspiction that user is a bot - he still won't get banned nor will you get a reroll.
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It's against the ToS though ("the Content is not spam, is not machine or randomly-generated"). It's just that at the moment no decision has been made on how to deal with these.
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well on a related note, i dont like the blacklist system, more specifically people's arbitrary reasons for using it... people get put on blacklists for saying thanks, for not saying thanks, for leaving comments at all, for having a debate on the forums...
i'm on a blacklist of a major user & i dont know why, i asked on his steam profile (2 likely possibilities, i just want a reason, doesnt matter if still blacklisted) & he deleted my comment! power messes people up...
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judging by your profile it's most likely ratio thing - still in the end it's the contributor who pays his own money for the game - it's his decision who he wants or wants not it to be givev to. Whatever reason there is for blacklisting - he has the full right for whatever reason he way feel like - maybe he doesn't like your avatar - doesn't matter - it's his money that's being spent on the game, noone has right to demand being able to enter GA for what he paid for.
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yes it's totally his right, but it's not disclosed anywhere & deletes my question as if i dont exist, making the profile look shiny with only positive comments
he gives out tons of all types, level0, level#+, whitelist, public, everything, seems fairly equal opportunity which is why it's so strange
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that may as well be the reason he blacklisted you - he gives a lot and in his eyes you're just leeching. Also there is no rule that requires him to answer you, don't delete your comments or explain the reason you got BLed. heck - if you won few more GAs you'd prolly got BLed by me as well, cause 6:1 ratio is shiet - I simply tend to let users go unless they win like 2X GAs without repairing their ratio, but like I said - it's me and I have my own rules for BLing ppl, others have their own.
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i just explained the situation & made a simple comment, not my fault a back & forth alert system isnt as good as a live chat that would have taken a min so we would be on our way
nor do i want to degrade into personal attacks, you wouldnt know if i'm butthurt or merely confused, why cant there be a serious discussion of ideas? this is the very problem anonymous discussion systems solve
(i even said it is his right, you could have easily left without the last half sentence that prompted this reply, i could also not write this part to avoid a potential reply, oh well)
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but you can blacklist only after you find out that this person is for example using a bot - and that will mean that he's probably already in your GA and blacklist doesn't work retroactively. ;) Plus BL has limited slots ;p Back in days when we were able to use support approved special rules one of mine was "comment to enter" - if I would blacklist all ppl who were not following this rule I'd run out of blacklist slots in few GAs. Because even with rule "comment or reroll" for low lvl private GAs I was still getting like 100 comments for 200 entries.
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it does ;) maximum blacklist size is 1000 users. now look at this GA posted elsewhere in this thread: http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/FOgs0/marlow-briggs-and-the-mask-of-death - 109 comments, 4 were answers tro comments, so 105 actual comments. 7 of them were "thank you", so only 98 valid comments per 973 entries - it would mean 875 users to be added to 1000-slots blacklist because of just one GA ;p
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Ask a question in the description and note that we winner must have replied to it
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post asked for hints or tips for getting rid of bots without using level restriction - blacklisting bots and ppl who doesn't read descriptions in the process is a valid solution, even while it won't work for long because you will run out of blacklist slots ;p
no need to fight over vocabluary thou - from comments OP will already know he can put something like that in description, use it to blacklist but cannot use it for reroll ;) And that should be the point ;)
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Make a very simple puzzle, like how many sites use pictures that you have to type the letters/numbers etc.
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A week ago I've made a lil experiment:
http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/FOgs0/
From the entries and number of comments you can see how many people don't give a shit, don't bother reading the description or worse they are just bots (especially the 7 thank yous :p)
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i get that. but just remember that people don't understand English well.
and if they see a long description they just leave it.
i really think at least half of those variations of thank you didn't read cause they can't.
no excuse, but still...
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on the topic, don't want to write same thing again :D: http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/wZB9s/how-can-i-avoidblock-bots-from-entering-giveaways#65K4cBj
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Actually, believe it or not, uh, I haven't filled my BL after at least five. Though, if I remember correctly, some of those were level 1+ (my go to for screening out "bad" users... not that level 0's are bad, but most leechers/bots/spammers/scripters happen to be 0's).
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see the link I pasted 1 comment above yours ;) ofc it all depends on what GAs you make, because number of entries you get depends on this ;p If you make GAs for games that has been bundled to death there will be much less entries = much less ppl to BL than if you make non-bundle GA ;p Same way if you were to make let's say lvl 0 GTA V GA you would probably run out of BL slots in 1/5th of GA timer :D:
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;)
Edit - K, I'm not gonna to leave you with this short answer, so I will just say to you that you won't make a bot that will read question on itstoohard page, understand that he must go back to the thread, open wiki page under "Queen Elizabeth" keyword and use 4th word from 3rd paragraph as answer to bot-wall. Sure you will be able to do one-time script for this exact situation, but it will never be universal bot for all puzzles like that.
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Of course not, but I can put your question into my already-nice AI module, with big vocabulary, hence, even use wolfram alpha for some complex math questions (for example), and achieve something that will work in 50% cases while spending 5x less time than you writing a question.
Making puzzles is a good way to get rid of the bots, and I don't know of anyone having enough time to do something like itstoohard puzzle module solving, although, it's still puzzle, if somebody would pay me nice, I could show you that it is possible to code something like that.
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Most of you really have no idea how bots work.
If I wanted, I could spend my next ~15 minutes on writing a bot that will detect giveaway with "please no thanks" description, and those without that and act accordingly. You actually have no idea that most if not all of the users commenting on "no comments" giveaways are not bots but just retarded people that don't give a damn f*ck about what you want and just click the button, and comment if they want to.
Luckily I'm always out of points spending on whitelist, private and group giveaways, so I'm rarely even joining anything in public ones. But if I wanted to make a bot for myself, I'd just make one that joins giveaways and do not comment at all, while laughing at people like you putting effort in blindly trying to blacklist bot users, without even understanding how they do work.
There's no mechanism to detect if the request coming from web browser was made by the bot or the user. Developer can always improve the script, add random delay, add random commenting/not commenting, description parsing (hell, even my ArchiBoT has that already), and many other random factors that would affect the outcome. Even a random chance for NOT joining the giveaway.
The only real defense against that is to make puzzles (assuming guys like me won't write a script that will try to do simple yes/no tries on all puzzles, which is possible too), but even then, it's totally possible to just bruteforce the giveaways when somebody puts '?' in the place of the link for example, thinking that he's "so smart" to kill all the bots.
Making a bot is like telling a stupid monkey all possible ways to achieve the goal. If stupid human can be smart enough to do thing X, for example reading the question and putting "yes" as the answer, I can pretty much create a bot that does the same. Making bots smarter are limited only by time and knowledge of the programmer, and complexity of the thing that needs to be done. If you really think that puzzle with one "yes/no" question is that hard for bots to pass through, then you're deeply wrong. Although, I must confirm, that most guys making bots don't give a damn about such specific cases and are enough happy by joining public & invite only gibs found in the discussions. Public data (such as required level, time ending and number of entries) is enough to make very efficient bot that will join giveaways with the chance very comparable to private giveaways, because the number of people that will join 1 hour giveaway with L4+ is much less than number of people that will put "yes" in the puzzle and join one-week invite-only L1+ giveaway. So why one should waste his time on that, when the final outcome is not worth it.
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I think the main question is not what bots could do, but what do they actually do (if we suppose they exist). You (or somebody) might be able to make a bot capable of solving student's puzzles, but would you even bother?
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No, I wouldn't bother because the final outcome is not worth time spent on doing that. Automation is efficient when time spent on writing the code will benefit programmer in long run. For example I made my ArchiBoT to do giveaways parsing for my Touhou Giveaways group, so I don't need any humans to enter all giveaways into the database, calculate points or mark the winners. I spent maybe 10 hours on that, and it saved me at least 50 hours already. Hence, my bot even automatically kicks people out of the group if he considers someone as a leecher (e.g. a negative ratio guy joining all giveaways he can before getting kicked).
And that's why I laugh off badly when I see people attempting to "trick" the bots by adding things like "please don't post thanks or blacklist", or changing one letter in giveaway link, writing what is it next to it and thinking how smart they are because they're now bot-safe. Most of the bots do not comment at all, same as most of the users. Fighting is just a waste of time, because bots could always find a way through something, and all people adding additional layers of "bot security" into their giveaways are wasting much more time than a programmer to overcome those obstacles.
The question is what is efficient in terms of getting rid of the bots, and as I said - a simple puzzle, with complex answer.
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You just have to make a puzzle and have the entire questions written in captcha-style images. This will prevent both bots and users from entering, because neither the bot programmer, nor the regular user, will bother with deciphering it.
Now I have an idea for a future puzzle... Maniacal evil laughter
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Using google's method of an image-set where you need a human to recognize which images are of what generally seems to be the new standard (and works well enough for now). Example: 6 images, click the ones that contain a pineapple. Generally a simple bot-script won't easily do that. (assuming you don't use google's image search against them but even then the results are not consistent enough).
Could be adapted to counting the amount to use itstoohard. Then again some dev intervention would be nice against bruteforcing botscripts.
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As Archi said, if someone was to code a "smart" bot it would be hard to completely prevent it from entering. But AFAIK, here on SG we're mostly dealing with scripts automating entries so it's not that hard to thwart them. Just make a private giveaway and put it behind an easy itstoohard puzzle ("What was the color of Napoleon's black horse?") that you link in the forums.
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That's a big prob, not enough people reading the descriptions. I like to read them, never know what you will find. I've found a couple of absolutely amazing groups just because of reading descriptions, so it certainly can pay off. I've also avoided some blacklists, and found secret giveaways as well by reading them! Now I pretty much always read them, just in case something completely mind-blowing is within the couple of lines of text.
You just never know...
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Only today i realized some people with a very high ratio of winning and nonsensically thanking every giveaway game can be bots (you can call me feeble minded if you will). I want to give games without level restrictions.Any hints or tips?
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