No more bots!

Started by B_2

tealight Lv 1

I know perfectly well who tlaloc is thanks.
An extremely good programmer and software developer
He was contracted by foldit on a fixed term contract to implement functionality etc to Lua.

ptfrog Lv 1

It may be that this conversation has largely run its course, since we have reached the stage where we are simply disagreeing about fundamentals. But there were a couple of ideas that came out, and I'd still like to get feedback on them.

"What if I split the posted URL in such a way that it wraps in IRC? For 99+% of URLs, this would involve nothing more than adding a space after each slash. That way folks who do not trust tinyurl can type in the full version. Even folks who do use tinyurl would probably appreciate the security of being able to read the URL that they are being directed to. (I know that I would.) I dislike anything that adds noise to the IRC channel, but if it has value I'd be happy to add the feature. What saith the ops?"

and

"teaching a noob to fish:" briefly explaining how to click through to links on the foldit site – instead of, or in addition to, the tinyurl.

Comments? Anyone who has stuck it out this far has a genuine interest in the topic, so I would appreciate your thoughts. That said, it probably makes sense to open a separate thread for this discussion; I think I'll do that and post the link here.

ptfrog Lv 1

I have just opened the thread

urlbot security improvements and suggestions
http://fold.it/portal/node/991511

I propose that in keeping with the subject lines, we keep discussion of the merits of bots and URL shorteners in this thread, and discussion of urlbot features in that one.

Tlaloc Lv 1

I need to make clear that I don't speak for the foldit team. My post is from my knowledge of the Internet, and as my feeling for what is and isn't a security problem. I don't feel that urlbot is any substantial and real risk, and that there is nothing to address here. Believe me that I'm about 10 times more security conscious than the typical user of the Internet.

In any case, this is not a bug, and should not be classified as one. Furthermore since it does not crash the foldit client for a substantial number of people or make the game unplayable, it is certainly not a priority one issue.

What Seth and Zoran feel about chat bots, I don't know. The best they can do with bots is ask people not to put them on global chat, since foldit chat just uses irc. They can block individual usernames or ip addresses if something malicious is detected, but I just don't see this as something that they should spend resources on. They have few enough and there are far more important issues for them to spend their time on.