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Written by Wojciech Kocjan
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Last night I've managed to close down everything I wanted to test for automating some of the Web 2.0 sites. I'm testing on how good bot I can make and simulate a real user on some of the popular sites out there.
Some of you might have already seen my previous tests and bots in action. Well, you might even see them often, but just don't realize they're not humans. Anyway, for last months I've been playing with automating online games and social networking sites. However, I really lacked a good framework for this - good task management, good debugging, logging and troubleshooting. All of that was rather ad-hoc and was scratched some time ago.
Now I'm testing my latest toy - a framework for doing web bots. Captcha handling included (by finding someone to retype the damn thing manually). It's not just any framework - one that resembles a real browser in 95%, combined with serious tools for adapting it to any website that I'll need. The idea is simple - manage identities and data for each user, map IP addreseses to users, manage tasks, allow remote debugging and quite nice tools for deploying these tools in a distributed system.
For now tests have proven that it works quite smoothly. I've played with a few social sites and my favorite one - Travian game. The last is interesting since everything worked quite nice. My bots made plans on what to build, calculated destination resource production, took that into consideration for next iteration of plan etc. And they played 24h/day - and no admin detected them for weeks. One bot was even in the first 100 players after a reset of the game for some time. I only did one mistake - when one bot had resources the other one needed, other ones sent it to that bot. Yeah, I did not read the rules of the game - and all of them got banned. But still - quite cool that even online games didn't detect them as bots.
As for social networking sites, I won't name them since I could get banned there. They're mainly Polish sites, focusing on where number of users and their activity on the site do make a difference.
On a final note - everything is of course done in Tcl/Tk, using Tclkit. And some poeple still claim you can't do cool things in Tcl... |
