RE: The Bot Wars – the defeat of CAPTCHA and the rise of a new hero to secure your forms – part one
Greatly written article! I love the way you write!
If you have the solution, I would make sure you monetise this before throwing the details, or even the idea out in the open!
Can you invent something that can detect the bots here at Steemit? I opt for a bot-less Steemit, ok, reading bots are ok, but no vote bots please. They do not enhance the user experiences of the community, I actually believe they harm the user experience and are partially the cause of a shorter short tail when it comes to reward distribution. So much looking forward when we can make Steemit a human service, rather than a bot dominated service.
Lessons learned? When setting a step into some new direction (collecting data through forms for instance), always, and I mean always be aware of miss-use, of new stuff invented to use whatever you just created, to your disadvantage, or to harm it in another way. History showed that over and over again.
like a finger in a dyke
LOL, I'm Dutch, so this remark related very much here, I even think we invented that remark, or better 'saying'.
hehe thanks for your reply. ;-)
My way of dealing with bots, as I'll explain in the next post, is something anyone can do really. (well anyone who can write a bit of Javascript)
And I am monetising it. I'm putting it up on Steemit!! hehe
I have a few bits and pieces of code that I'm hoping to put up to help people out. I've been meaning to get this one done for ages, and some conversations recently prodded me to do it.
It's not so much a plugin or anything, although I could give you the code to do it. It's a method of setting things up and manipulating things to confound the bots.
I don't think it would work on Steemit because I think the bots work directly on the blockchain through the cli interface.
I could be completely wrong about that though. I've not really investigated it.
And I agree that steemit would be better without the voting bots.
The most valuable solutions are usually those that are super simple :) FB service was a super simple one! And see were they are now? 450B$ marker cap. Monetise this through the likes of Google, FB and others. Or at least for SME (small and medium enterprises). Setup you own little company and tell the world you have a rock solid solution for form bots, something way better than Captcha and reCaptcha. I'm pretty sure you can earn lost more dollars than here on Steemit. BTW, if you prefer to get payed by the normal world in crypto coins, offer a service were they convert their dollars into crypto coins of your preferences all under water :) This is just my commercial sense talking! So, in case you do not necessarily want to get 'rich' in terms of whatever currency, still take all that money and start a foundation were you support whatever you want to support; In that way you control distribution of funds.
BTW, I'm interested to help you setup such project / enterprise! :)
I hear what you're saying, but the problem is many fold-
1 - anyone can do this
2 - I want to make the interweb better, and if that means by giving away some stuff, I'm good with that
3 - my ultimate goal is to get out of programming and write for a living
4 - I'm sure there was a 4 in there somewhere, but it's getting late and my brain has officially clocked off for the evening
edit -
Once I put the solution up, if you want to take it and run with it and make a fortune, go for it ;-) and good luck to you.
I'm not an engineer, writing scripts or code is not my thing. So I need you to support. BUT that said, I appreciate your views and go along with those! :) Looking fwd to your next post explaining the secret!