[Question/Discussion] Techniques to stop puzzle cheaters

For pictures. One way to combat puzzle cheaters is to fool reverse image lookup like google by placing some overlay patterns in the picture like what I did on my previous puzzle

Then just erase important parts in the overlay to make it still solvable

I see what you did there.

I also remember one technique I read before.

1) You could modify the image where it is like READ-ONLY. If someone tries to save the image. They will see a blank/different image. I don't know the exact procedure how to do it, but that basically what it does.

Still the problem with that is they can still print screen the image :/

The two main problems I encountered were:

1) People asking for help on other websites, posting links back to the music clips

2) People sharing the giveaway link or sharing/collaborating on quiz answers with their friends

I don't really have a solution to 1.

For 2, you can do a couple things. Require everyone who solves to comment on the giveaway and track every commenter/solver... but this doesn't prevent someone from just giving the quiz answers to a friend. The other thing is just make a decently high contributor value. Most of the sharers I found had fairly low contribs, some none at all (not surprising). But then that excludes legitimate users "in need" that want to solve your puzzle honestly.

So really no good solutions, IMO.

Other alternative... group puzzles. jatan's series of puzzles/quizzes he did a month or so ago was awesome. We were allowed to share answers in the comments, so really anyone could solve them, you just had to dig through the comments looking for the right answers. Once we were 10+ quizzes deep, there were only a handful of us left.

Personally, I'll probably just only do either group, high contrib, or fully public giveaways from now on. No privates, unless it's like S.Gifts chat or something.

I've never hosted a puzzle myself so I can't say I have much experience in that regard.

The problem seems to lie in that ultimately there is a direct link to the giveaway that can be sent on to others. There's no way around that which I can think of. Maybe if SG had something like a code to enter a giveaway (like you had to solve the puzzle to get the code, but the giveaway was public) or something like that? Even then, people could just tell others the code.

Honestly, it's a rather tricky problem to solve in a simple matter.

How about a link protector/hider or website sandbox?

Is there such thing? Like a service that will load steamgifts website to a different domain but will show the website on a different address on the browser and all links/source code are jumbled/encrypted?

Its like what some proxy sites do. It makes all links encrypted, make the current address in the address bar different except it won't show the original giveaway link

You need something like what Googly does in his mazes, generating a unique code for each solver. I have no idea how it's done though - but it prevents people sharing the link :)

Did you read my thread about this a couple of weeks back? Cheaters will be cheaters.

I still do simple private puzzles, but I'm saving all of my good stuff for my next group puzzle pretty much because there's not a good way to stop cheating.

Gainja mentioned this above, but the best anti-cheat method I've seen so far is with TGGMs mazes. Finding the giveaways in his maze generated a unique hash code that you had to post on the giveaway to win without a reroll. Unfortunately, this isn't really a feasible method for most other types of puzzles.

I've never experienced it because my puzzles were all quite easy to solve (I made them that way on purpose) But it must be frustrating to ideate a hard one and then see it leaked.

I cannnot help you with that though, I lack the knowledge, but I do hope a solution can be found.

The very best solution I've seen so far, is the guy who makes mazes. Somehow, when you find a giveaway, it comes with an ID and he asks you to post it in the comments in order to enter.

You could always make an actual puzzle with 20 parts of which only 10 fit together and are randomly showed to each player when he gets to the screen with the puzzle parts.

Only way to cheat there would be for someone to make a video and post it on YouTube which kinda shortens the list of cheats to one.

Or you can all keep making these non-sense treasurer hunts, hiding links and answering insane questions.

As for just giving someone the link to the giveaway... I have no ideas.

Not taking sides here, but there's some puzzles out there that just scream "please cheat on me!"

Questions like "Wat color iz teh sun? :3 " Answer: Bacon!!! (with 3 exclamation marks, very important) are pretty frustrating.

Cheaters are probably a problem (i never did any puzzle so i don't really know about that), but i think there may be misjudgement in some cases. I love solving puzzles and if my friend loves it too i fear being called cheater because we both joined giveaway when we both solved it. My point is how you know if someone gave link to his friend and not they both solved it

I figured out a way to cheat, but I already had the game anyway.

I say brand them with a capital C for cheater (or c##t) so we can recognize them easier.