I thought I would repost this as I think it's likely the quickest and easiest way to stop bots on Splinterlands....
If you read this post please make sure to share it around so it gets to the correct people.
Solution for Stopping Bots Forever!
I'm no longer a player at splinterlands, however it does have a special place in my heart as one of the first crypto games I played and enjoyed...
This bot situation has been ongoing for far too long with splinterlands and in all honesty it's easy enough to block these botnets as there's only a few of them (as in bot scripts being used) and there's many options to help block bots, especially today with advancements in machine learning and ai.
So, my day job is front end web developer and many times throughout my day job we are tasked with blocking bots from accessing a website / api. It's really not that difficult to do and even with the most advanced bots you can still block them. Cloudflare even has a membership the splinterlands team could join today and I guarantee the botnets running would be stopped tomorrow... @yabapmatt.sps take a look at https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/bots/what-is-bot-traffic/ and consider buying a plan... it'd be very cost effective and would take a lot of the work out for you. Another good tool to stop bots would be data dome: https://datadome.co/products/bot-protection/ again all managed for you and stops even the most advanced bots.
Here's a few simple methods you can use to block bots, if you don't want to pay for added cloudflare protection:
Block or CAPTCHA outdated user agents/browsers (all modern browsers force auto-updates, and lots of botnets use older browsers for specific features)
Block known hosting providers and proxy services (digital ocean, gigeNET, OVH, Choopa all blocked and make sure to require a captcha for amazon)
Use tools to track mouse movement / page views (allows you to check for human behaviour)
Block blank referrers
Install honeypots for bots (by swapping key elements within the site such as function names, html, classes etc. you can trick the bots into trying to click on the wrong element which only a bot would do with 100% guarantee... also side effect = the botnet must constantly update itself to keep up)
If anyone from the splinterlands team wants to chat about this then let me know and we'll get this bot problem resolved easy peasey.
@everyone please get this seen by the right people... literally as soon as they buy the bot protection plan the game is saved from bots... and if they don't want to pay for protection then the above list should still be some good basic starting points and I can list more if necessary.
@davemccoy I remember being part of your guild and if I remember correctly you know a few people working at splinterlands... would it be possible to get this message out to stop the bot problem and fix the reward pool drainage and dump?
Yes I will. But also keep an eye on what happens in just a few days, there will be a drastic impact that has been long overdue.
Thank you very much! I'm hoping the new rules they are implementing will help, but this will stop bots from accessing the website entirely. I hope that the tools listed here are being used, or if not they are implemented as this will help dramatically.
I also like the changing of html element names, classes etc. as this will require the bots to be reprogrammed often incurring a cost to the bot developers, plus a lot of downtime for the bots annoying their customer base.... Plus on top of this they could track the accounts which are instantly stopping playing once the classes and names are changed, thus finding names of bot accounts allowing bans to happen.
We definitely can stop the bots and I think once they are stopped that the game will grow organically again, it's just a case of implementing multiple catches for the bots and paying for one of the many bot protection services... the 2 listed here are amongst the best.
Thank you for the tag here and I do think some of these tools are now being used. On top of that, there will be a massive washout of large bot farms when the new rules come into force in 3 more days.
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