Market Bot Question
Hey guys, so I'm using cyanide's release of the marketplace bot script for tampermonkey. It has been working great. I plan on using it for no more than 3 hours per day and at a minimum refresh rate of about 25 seconds for better safety. Also I only use it when I am online / semionline so that it is not the only page being used over and over, kind of to hide it in and mix it up. Anyways my question is, based on how I plan to use it how safe do you think it is? chances of getting banned? for those of you that have experience with bots (preferably marketplace bots) what worked best for you? and have you ever been banned? Thanks.
Chances of getting banned could be pretty high if it doesn't have built-in timers or delays or anything like that. You also might want to be careful, though, because you could lose tons of money because of the fact that the program doesn't auto-update the prices.
I took out almost everything out of the item list. So I'm not worried about the item part but the ban part.
As for the delay, It seems to only refresh at the same time set. so for example every 25 seconds. I stopped using it for now since I was wondering if there was a way to make it refresh at a random time between 2 set time frames. For example any random time between 20 - 60 seconds. I went ahead and asked the creator see what he had to say.
EDIT:
and for better security I plan to only use it WHILE browsing gaia etc, so that it's not the only page being used over time. I don't plan to leave it running over night and stuff like that.
If you only have the 25 second on the second delay them your chances of getting banned are pretty high since no one sits there and refreshes the page every 25 seconds for 3 hours straight. I don't know about Gaia but when I used to autobuy on neopets I had it set up to AB for and hour then stop and go refresh around the website for about 20-30minutes then go back to abing in that cycle for about 5-6 hours. Using that method I only had one account get banned and it was my suicide account that ran for like 3 days straight (got about 800m profit to my main before it got iced)
Well what I did is try to make it mimick my own vending patterns. Namely refreshing usually about twice a second, sometimes taking a few seconds to look at something more closely, sometimes taking half a minute to check facebook, sometimes taking a few minutes to talk to my roommate, etc. I tried to make it functionally indistinguishable from me sitting behind the keyboard.
I also used Adblock not only to speed things up, but also to block any outgoing AJAX requests because I'm paranoid like that (putting * on your block list will do that). I doubt Gaia will be putting anti-bot javascript into the marketplace any time soon but like I said, I'm paranoid. And even if they did, the bot dot doesn't do any of the easily detectable stuff like altering the DOM.
So assuming you can write delay code that reasonably mimicks a human being, and Gaia doesn't get ultra militant about marketplace bots, I think you should be ok. But botting is always risky of course. Personally I got to the point where I could afford almost anything I wanted and decided to stop because you never know when your time's up.
Oh also I'd definitely advise against browsing Gaia while running it. That would be some very fishy multitasking. Probably the safest thing to do if you're worried would be to run it for like half an hour, stop it, check your messages, sell some stuff, and start it up again.
And yes you definitely shouldn't have it refresh with a set time with no variation. The code that's in there by default is fairly similar to the code I used, and that has a ton of variation. If you want to do your own (which I would advise if you're able to), quick lesson:
wait_time = 700 + (Math.random()*2-1)*400;
That waits a random time between 300 and 1100 milliseconds. The 700 is your average wait time in milliseconds, and the 400 is the range. Math.random()*2-1 generates a uniform random number between -1 and 1.
Even better:
wait_time = 1500 + (Math.random()*2-1 + Math.random()*2-1 + Math.random()*2-1)*400;
This creates a normal distribution which is more natural and human than a uniform distribution (above). That should create a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 400 and a maximum deviation of 1200 (think bell-curve).
Yea I use it for a max of 3 hours but not continuous xD. Total in a day. And since I'm also browsing the site on a separate tab (posting etc) it makes it look more legit. It's also why I want to know how to make the refresh be random times between a set of given time delays, so its not at an exact amount of time. Thanks for the feedback though, I wont be using it much for the moment until I can find a way to make the times be random.
Seems to be only on your end.