Bitcointalk Account price estimator

[achow101]

So I have finished the final coding and it is ready for deployment. The only issue is that too many requests will result in an ip ban from Bitcointalk, which is an issue I am working on right now. I will update back when the site is up and running.

[1715334071]

1715334071

[1715334071]

1715334071

[WhoCaresCoins]

It's looks interesting project 

[DaddyMonsi]

how do you compute the value for Potential Activity?
our account only shows Posts and Activity

I have made a bot to calculate potential activity.
You can check demo at:
http://www.satoshiquiz.com/bitcointalk/getactivity.php

Limit:
Only accounts with max 100 posts will work in demo mode.

ok. Nice bot you have there. I checked the link, unfortunately my posts is over 100 so it didn't work
i'll just wait for my account to increase its level every other Wednesday and hopefully by September i reach Full Member

[achow101]

So I am a little stuck with a small issue of ip bans. Bitcointalk will ban my server's ip if it makes too many requests at once. The limit is 1 request per second. The way that I have written my program is that it will request all of the pages where it shows the posts of a person and use those to calculate the potential activity. The issue is that if multiple people use it at once, then I will be violating the 1 request per second rule and get an ip ban.

Thus, I need your help to brainstorm ways to solve this problem
So far I have tried

• Asking Theymos to whitelist the IP (No response yet)
• Doing the requests browser side (doesn't work due to same-origin policy)

And I have thought of but not yet tried

• creating a queue where one person goes at a time
• doubling the wait time two 2 seconds per request thus allowing 2 simultaneous requests
• Using something that can distribute each potential activity calculation to another server

What you guys suggest I will add below.

• Ask Bitcoin_BOy$ who manages Bit-x sig campaign bot (suggested by ColderThanIce)

[ColderThanIce]

One idea to get around that rule would to be by going through one of the Bitcointalk mirrors. However, most of the mirrors are probably phishing sites so I'm not sure if you'd want to go that route, but it would possibly be a solution because they are exact mirrors, and if the site was requesting more than one page per second, it would be their problem rather than yours.

Another idea would be to contact the person who manages the Bit-x signature campaign bot - I believe his name is Bitcoin_BOy$. I suspect that often times his bot would be requesting more than one page per second, but it's been running for months so he must have some way to bypass the one page per second rule.

If you don't want to take either of those routes, the queue idea sounds like the best proposed method, if you don't hear back from theymos on your question.

[jeffthebaker]

As someone who has dabbled in account trading and plan to continue my endeavors in the future, this is a great tool and I thank you for your work, OP. It's great to have a tool to estimate account worth rather than going off of my own (un)educated guess

[Kakmakr]

I would offer this as a paid service on a website. Instead of taking donations, just ask a few Satoshi's for it's use.
Once people get familiar with the service, and experts have checked the code for security issues, this might become a profitable venture for you. 

I will not go through all the trouble to pull the code and execute it through a website... but I will visit a website and use the service, when I need it. I love my account too much to sell it anyways, but I guess there are a need for it
out there.

More people will do this, if they know how valuable accounts can become.

[--Encrypted--]

nice project. but I think the base price per activity is a little high. maybe reduce it to 0.0006 or something.

also keep in mind that signature campaigns are one of the biggest reason that bitcointalk account is worth something in the first place. so we can be sure that the price will be affected if all signature campaigns reduce or increase their payment. not to mention that someone might sell an account for a reduced amount because of the tight competition in the market.

[achow101]

I would offer this as a paid service on a website. Instead of taking donations, just ask a few Satoshi's for it's use.
Once people get familiar with the service, and experts have checked the code for security issues, this might become a profitable venture for you. 

I will not go through all the trouble to pull the code and execute it through a website... but I will visit a website and use the service, when I need it. I love my account too much to sell it anyways, but I guess there are a need for it
out there.

More people will do this, if they know how valuable accounts can become.

I'm actually going to put some ads on it so that it will be free for everyone to use while I can still make some Bitcoin off of it. It is just like paying a few Satoshis to have the ads up while not having to go through the hassle of sending them.

[ColderThanIce]

I'm actually going to put some ads on it so that it will be free for everyone to use while I can still make some Bitcoin off of it. It is just like paying a few Satoshis to have the ads up while not having to go through the hassle of sending them.

That's a good idea - be sure to add a donation address to your site as well!

Have you figured out how you'll deal with the one request per second rule yet, and any ETA on when the site would be made public?

[achow101]

I'm actually going to put some ads on it so that it will be free for everyone to use while I can still make some Bitcoin off of it. It is just like paying a few Satoshis to have the ads up while not having to go through the hassle of sending them.

That's a good idea - be sure to add a donation address to your site as well!

Have you figured out how you'll deal with the one request per second rule yet, and any ETA on when the site would be made public?

I'm going to use a queuing system and limit requests to once every 5 minutes. The site should be public by August 10th.

[ColderThanIce]

I'm actually going to put some ads on it so that it will be free for everyone to use while I can still make some Bitcoin off of it. It is just like paying a few Satoshis to have the ads up while not having to go through the hassle of sending them.

That's a good idea - be sure to add a donation address to your site as well!

Have you figured out how you'll deal with the one request per second rule yet, and any ETA on when the site would be made public?

I'm going to use a queuing system and limit requests to once every 5 minutes. The site should be public by August 10th.

Cool, I'll be sure to watch this topic then. Although I don't trade accounts at all or anything like that I'll be interested to see the site.

[jbrnt]

So I am a little stuck with a small issue of ip bans. Bitcointalk will ban my server's ip if it makes too many requests at once.

I think you should use user side to query the forum, so the service can be made available to more than one user at the same time. If you query the forum server side, you will need to change server IP if your IP gets banned for some reason.

[ColderThanIce]

So I am a little stuck with a small issue of ip bans. Bitcointalk will ban my server's ip if it makes too many requests at once.

I think you should use user side to query the forum, so the service can be made available to more than one user at the same time. If you query the forum server side, you will need to change server IP if your IP gets banned for some reason.

I think he tried that option out, but it didn't work out as planned. See here:

• Doing the requests browser side (doesn't work due to same-origin policy)

[achow101]

So I am a little stuck with a small issue of ip bans. Bitcointalk will ban my server's ip if it makes too many requests at once.

I think you should use user side to query the forum, so the service can be made available to more than one user at the same time. If you query the forum server side, you will need to change server IP if your IP gets banned for some reason.

The problem is a policy called same-origin policy in which browser's prevent the page from querying a domain different from the sites own domain. Thus, I can't have it query bitcointalk browser side unless my domain is bitcointalk.

[achow101]

Sorry everyone, but I don't have the site ready yet  Life happened and I didn't have the time to set everything up. Fortunately, the code is almost done, I just need to add a few things for the production version which is slightly different from the github version (ads and ip waits). I think it will be done and the site will be up by Friday latest.

[lastuser]

how do you compute the value for Potential Activity?
our account only shows Posts and Activity

I have made a bot to calculate potential activity.
You can check demo at:
http://www.satoshiquiz.com/bitcointalk/getactivity.php

Limit:
Only accounts with max 100 posts will work in demo mode.

ok. Nice bot you have there. I checked the link, unfortunately my posts is over 100 so it didn't work
i'll just wait for my account to increase its level every other Wednesday and hopefully by September i reach Full Member

Check this activity calculator then
http://bitcoin.coxslot.com/get_activity.php

[achow101]

My website is up and usable at http://www.bctalkaccountpricer.info/

The site is very simple, just enter the User ID and it will do everything for you. There is a queuing system in place to prevent the server from being IP banned by Bitcointalk. The site will let you know where you are in the queue and will automatically retrieve all of the information when it is your turn.

There are a few notable differences between the website version and the version on github:

• Ads - The website has ads to help me support the site. I did not include the code for the ads in the github
• IP wait times - The website will require you to wait 5 minutes before it will let you submit another request. This is to prevent DoS attacks on the site. The Github contains the code for this, but it is commented out.
• Account bot password - In order for the website to work, an account is required to view the trust of members. The Github has a placeholder password THAT DOES NOT WORK while the website has the correct password.

If you have issue with any of the above, please let me know and see if we can fix the problem.

If you find any bugs in the website, please contact me here or using the issue tracker on Github.

[ColderThanIce]

My website is up and usable at http://www.bctalkaccountpricer.info/

The site is very simple, just enter the User ID and it will do everything for you. There is a queuing system in place to prevent the server from being IP banned by Bitcointalk. The site will let you know where you are in the queue and will automatically retrieve all of the information when it is your turn.

There are a few notable differences between the website version and the version on github:

• Ads - The website has ads to help me support the site. I did not include the code for the ads in the github
• IP wait times - The website will require you to wait 5 minutes before it will let you submit another request. This is to prevent DoS attacks on the site. The Github contains the code for this, but it is commented out.
• Account bot password - In order for the website to work, an account is required to view the trust of members. The Github has a placeholder password THAT DOES NOT WORK while the website has the correct password.

If you have issue with any of the above, please let me know and see if we can fix the problem.

If you find any bugs in the website, please contact me here or using the issue tracker on Github.

Great work! I just tested with my account and it found my account's estimated value in less than 15 seconds. I do have one suggestion regarding the ads. The top banner ad looks a little out of place, maybe if you centered it that would make it look a little better? But overall great work, the only other thing maybe worth tweaking a little bit is the formula for finding the account value, it estimated that my account is worth ~ 0.12 BTC. I'd estimate that it would actually be worth 0.07 BTC or so at most, since Senior Member accounts seem to be selling for fairly cheap here now ( < 0.2 BTC).

[achow101]

Great work! I just tested with my account and it found my account's estimated value in less than 15 seconds. I do have one suggestion regarding the ads. The top banner ad looks a little out of place, maybe if you centered it that would make it look a little better?

Huh. It looks centered to me. What browser are you using?

But overall great work, the only other thing maybe worth tweaking a little bit is the formula for finding the account value, it estimated that my account is worth ~ 0.12 BTC. I'd estimate that it would actually be worth 0.07 BTC or so at most, since Senior Member accounts seem to be selling for fairly cheap here now ( < 0.2 BTC).

I have noticed the decreasing prices and I will soon adjust the estimation accordingly.