Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
I am a programmer, and I would like to write a support script for ICO Bounty campaign (counting signatures on this forum).
Am I allowed to write a spider to crawl the forum (say, daily, new topics only), or will it cause a ban?

Thank you

Contact Theymos will your proposal and if he approves, he will give you a special key to bypass the captcha.

You cannot hit the server more often than once per second over average.

Thank you... but how do I contact Theymos?

Send a PM to him: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=35

Don't expect a answer right away, he probably receives hundreds if not thousands of personal messages a day, and most of them will be trash.

Thanks

I thought of this earlier as well.

Make a bot that allows the owner to choose which members to monitor.  Then parse all those messages and store them in a database.  You can then show the messages one at a time to the owner who simply needs to click "Yes" or "No" and the results gets tallied in a database.

You could sell the script outright or lease it per month.

One of the campaigns I used to run had a bot that did this. It was very time consuming to go through posts one by one but was effective as people only got paid for posts that I accepted if they met quality standards. I think many other campaigns already have bots or programs that already count/tally up qualifying posts but it's hard to check actual post quality without some form of manual verification. Both should be used in some capacity ideally.

Around 2-3 months ago I asked Lauda is he/she could benefit from such a bot.  The answer was no, so I never pursued it.

I don't know how he runs his campaigns but he at least benefitted from the bitmixer bot previously which was fairly simple but tallied up posts at least and I think it only counted posts from certain boards automatically. In the past I have just manually verified and counted and discounted non-qualifying posts on the smaller campaigns I have run but don't think I would run them now if they didn't have some sort of automatic process for tallying up qualified posts as it's just far too much work to count up. Obviously manually checking users for post quality also needs to be done too but a bot can do the actual counting.

That is pretty much what I do. But no answer yet :(
By the way, are you sure about capture? As I understand, I don't even need to be logged in in order to load pages. What I need is to avoid being blacklisted.

OOPS! I already got blacklisted :) And I only tested the bot.

Were you limiting your script at 1 second per access/crawl attempt?  I haven't had a need to bypass the captcha personally... but either way, I would have verified with theymos first before attempting.