Bot Check Idea. (in General)

My computers Hard drive recently broke, so i have been forced to use the office computer downstairs...which sucks.
i have noticed that it takes a while for the bot check to come up for me and it gave me this ides.

If for some reason my computer freezes or I get a fatal error and it forces me to log off CB. perhaps once I log on after i restart me computer my timer restarts in bot mode and i am allowed to finish it vs being unable to fight for an hour.

Your hard drive broke? How?

I would like it if the timer would stop if the bot check was not being viewed. That would stop a lot of the problems with fatal errors during a bot check.

Joel,

How is the computer supposed to know if the BOT check is being watched?

I don't know. Have I ever led anyone to believe that I know about internet and computer stuff? I was just hoping it was possible because, if it was, then it would be a nice solution.

How about everyone gets 1 free botcheck pass (for failure) once a month? Maybe even make it a supporter option. Kind of like how the black market works.

The big problem with AK and Joel's idea is that a Bot could very easily take advantage of that. Basically, the bot could fight until it hits a botcheck, then log out of cb until the bot-master returns to their computer.

Just be happy botchecks don't reset you if you miss them, like they did when they first came out.

It is quite possible for a web site to know / remember if a captcha has been presented to the user.

However, this involves a lot of work on the database and modification of the server side pages to get the logic just right. I don't think that amount of work justifies the need for that kind of change.

Even moreso, this idea can be taken advantage of too easily if someone was indeed running a bot.

If the change were to happen, I would modify it so that the timer does not reset. It could stop when not being viewed, but shouldn't reset.

Mmm.. I was not aware that there was any way for a website to report bact if it was the active window or the active tab of an active browser.

Not a bad idea. It could still be flagged as a miss in the records, so I see no harm.

The botcheck is fine as it is... Plus, 2 minutes is even pretty long IMO. One could easily make a bot send the botcheck picture to a cellphone then the botmaster sends the answer by mail which is read by the bot and there you go... Nothing much can be done about it anyways.

instead of a free one, how about you get credit towards the fine based on how long it has been since you last failed one? if you don't fail one often then you could get a free pass from the fine.

1k credit for each botcheck you answered correctly, maximum of 100k. If you fail a botcheck and don't use your credit it still goes back to 0.

That sounds fair!

or just take away the limit completely. Just everytime you try to fight, the botcheck is still there until you go ahead and answer it. Is there an actual reason there has to be a time limit?

the time limit, i assume, is there so that if it is a bot that just presses enter every thirty seconds then it will fail the bot check. which is as it should be.

The time limit is also there simply because a good bot can, with time, get more and more accurate. We're talking raw CPU power cracking the captcha, no matter what methodology is used. Given 10 minutes, a computer can read the graphics.

so just change the bot check that 10 presses of the enter key with no letters typed in also fails the bot check. I know most of us probably hit the enter key 1-2 times when a bot check comes up because you're just going through a fight list, but 10 times is really excessive for a human, and a bot will do that in what, 5 minutes. Heck even 5 enters with no input would probably be high enough to not hit humans with it.

You could always hook the bot check to a webcam...then 100000000000 lines of useless code later the thing would know if your looking at it

a good bot would never press enter unnecessarily, it would just waste processing time. if you take verifex's greasemonkey script as an example, when the forge helper hit a bot check, it didn't allow you to continue pressing the enter button, because it was very easy to detect a botcheck.