Metas, Auto Refreshers, and Bots

[Lilith]

OK, so simple questions, for discussion sake. (without telling me how stupid I am for not knowing.)

What are they?

How is each different from one another?

How do they work?

How are they used to cheat?

How do you stop them from being used?

[Aurora078]

OK, so simple questions, for discussion sake. (without telling me how stupid I am for not knowing.)

What are they?

How is each different from one another?

How do they work?

How are they used to cheat?

How do you stop them from being used?

Well Bots are mainly a program to do automated functions without needing a human to do the actions. There are Macro Bots and More Advanced Bots which used headers and such ( To do actions via url's ). Macro bots repeat a function that a user has done once before.

They work by well, headers or repeated actions.

Its pretty obvious how they are used to cheat. They can do automated functions, so anything such as the gym or crimes and other things can be repeated.

One way to stop them is using a captcha ( Not the mccodes captcha, that sucks :/ ). You should be aware they are not 100% effective, but depending on the person who built it it could be 99% or such. I suggest using reCaptcha, but thats my opinion

[Djkanna]

Don't use ReCaptcha that's about as UI friendly as the default MCC layout.

Not hard to create your own using Sessions and GD.

[Lilith]

Capchas are annoying for the user lol, are there some other ways? (that and I can barely read most of them)

[sniko]

A way ive thought of is;

Detect a sudden increase in user related stuff, for example, money/crystals etc. Then once detected, it adds it to a log and sends an event to the admin and other staff members and fetches their current URL and Referred URL of the user with the sudden increase (which will also be added to the log) using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] AND $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. This will notify the staff members and give them chance to investigate the sudden increase.

-sniko

[rulerofzu]

I use the following

Recaptcha on signup. You can style recaptcha and its not that bad if displayed correctly.

A different captcha on areas in the game. Just a simple number verification.

Also I do a max click on certain things too. Done by sessions for example say you want only 50 clicks

if($_SESSION['clicktyclick']++ == 50) { //unset the verifed status and make the player enter the captcha again.