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- Thread starter Kevy
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I'm attempting to block players from abusing voting on my server, but I've failed so far - how am I protected from this punishment when only a select few abuse the system on a specific server, in comparison to the majority of the votes being earned fairly?
Kevy
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- Jul 6, 2006
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You totally made me rethink this. I will try to implement such system asap. By stopping them to vote you give them hints how did you detect the cheating which will make them correct it.
Thanks, Kevin.
Thanks, Kevin.
This is the reason why I usually don't ban servers on RuneLocus. This used to happen a lot on my website, be careful on this Kevin.
First point is completely true, the second not lol. I haven't made such changes in years.
Technically seen it is definitely possible and pretty easy to stop vote bots... but just for a day or two. The developers of those bots will find a new way to trick the system before you get to celebrate your update. It really isn't worth the time to block vote bots, I gave up on that years ago. It'll become an unending routine of updates, and eventually a total waste of your time.
Instead of trying to stop vote bots, I moved onto just moderating the toplist. Works better for me, because my systems are able to detect almost all common vote bots as you can see.
But instead of blocking them like we've all been focusing on for the past years, I just let them vote.
Then at a random moment, I just suddenly remove (parts of) the cheated votes. Or even better: I let the system automatically remove the votes when they're (finally) about to beat another server in rank. It's great to see a cheater almost about to celebrate beating a (not cheating) competitor, but instead of sending it up in rank, send it down in rank. Karma.
That unfortunately does mean my toplist isn't 100% clean, obviously. But I don't think that's much of a problem. I'd rather have 10% cheated, than have 95% cheated (e.g. RSPS-List.com). Besides, this is obviously a lot easier for me, and a lot harder for the vote botter. They can update their bot to whatever they want after I remove the cheated votes, but they'll never know whether I'm still able to detect their votes or not until I remove the votes again.
Annoying and disappointing the cheaters seems to be the best solution these days. Server owners really respect the moderation, try to help me out by giving me tips and information on cheating software and eventually leak cheating scripts to me. So yes, it is worth to look into the toplist Stuart. Just not to block, you're right on that.
I haven't used reCAPTCHA in ages, instead I use FunCaptcha. It doesn't help stop vote bots at all though, don't bother getting it lol. I have it for other reasons.
Developing a bot to create some fake forum accounts is easy, doesn't solve the issue but will cause votes to drop to a minimum. Nobody is going to register an account to vote.
Exploiter
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- Oct 28, 2006
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I don't think the approach of letting them cheat without patching methods is a good idea. If you're going to counter this with moderation whether it be manual or automatic, you're just making the job harder on both systems. Even if they start coming up with complex methods that are hard to investigate or patch, there's bound to be a drastic drop in non-authentic votes the more methods you can avoid. This would make your job or whoever is moderating the list's job a hell of a lot easier.
It's not hard to differentiate which votes are botted versus real votes especially if you're gathering metrics. If you're not, and I'm hoping you are, you should. Based on what the RuneLocus team said, the best idea is to:
It's not hard to differentiate which votes are botted versus real votes especially if you're gathering metrics. If you're not, and I'm hoping you are, you should. Based on what the RuneLocus team said, the best idea is to:
- Patch what you can to make your job easier and their job harder.
- At the end of every day, week, or whatever it may be, trim out the botted votes using your metrics.
- Dec 15, 2016
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Noele
§ecurity Ⱥnalyst
- Dec 7, 2016
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Not to be rude, but I've personally suggested to you several times that it be moderated in general, comparing daily votes and spikes with a human eye. Not to mention reports already go unread, if not ignored, for several months on this topic (I know mine personally have). Like I said in PMs, certain mitigation will help you, but nothing is going to be the equivalent of actually paying attention.
lol you're disillusioned if you think kevy will actually produce anything out of this
Noele
§ecurity Ⱥnalyst
- Dec 7, 2016
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Of course I'd just like it to be publicly known that this topic is nothing more than cloudflare as a quick fix for Kevin to cover his own ass, when people like me say we've been reporting servers for months and having the reports ignored.
not to mention cloudflare isn't that hard to bypass unless its running in underattk all the time
Pretty late to the part here, but I'm curious what prevents a rival server or malicious actor from botting votes for a particular server in order to have them infracted and/or removed from the list?
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