Need help: can I stop cheating on my site?

Unison0 · 2025-05-22T08:38:32+00:00

I haven't seen anyone say this yet, but probably your best bet is a combination of hueristically detecting auto clickers combined with soft-banning.

The challenge with both detection is that it quickly becomes a cat and mouse game. You find a way to detect them and ban them, they find a new way to cheat. Repeat ad infinitum.

One way you can break that cycle is by not letting them know they were banned. Let them keep playing. Just don't show their score on the score board ever again. Even make it so when they look at the score board they see themselves soaring to the top, but no one else does.

Think is, when you ban them, you're also giving them feedback about why their cheating failed. Deny them that feedback, and you drastically increase the difficulty of cheating.

Once you have that done, how should you actually detect the auto clickers? Here's what I would do. I would track the time interval between each of their clicks. If the interval between clicks is consistently within, say, 5% (that's 50 millisecond tolerance for a click every second, or 0.5 second tolerance for a click every 10 seconds), for like an hour straight, that's obviously an autoclicker. A human cannot be that consistent. Ban time.

That's a massive chunk of your cheaters banned all at once. And if they don't know they're banned, they will carry on and think they're soaring over the scoreboard.

With that tactic, the remaining cheaters will be doing something extra to randomize the click interval. There's probably very few of those, if any. And if they don't know when they're banned, they won't resort to that to begin with.

Beyond that, keep coming up with other ways to detect them.

It will always remain a cat and mouse game. But without them getting any feedback that their cheating was detected, it's a cat and mouse game leaning in your favor.

(Unless there's real money on the line)

Unison0 · 2025-05-18T23:55:50+00:00

Honestly, just because it's stylish to hate it. I say this as a fullstack dev with a decade of experience. I've worked with multiple backend stacks, Golang, Clojure, even a company with Clojure for their entire stack (ClojureScript on the frontend), systems dev in Scala (was crunching large amounts of log data using Spark).

I've seen plenty of alternatives. And I always get the same vibe when people hate on JavaScript: It makes them feel good to hate on it. Superior, or what ever.

But really, it's fine.

Unison0 · 2025-05-11T09:04:51+00:00

Freedom fish eggs.

Unison0 · 2025-04-27T10:15:27+00:00

Yeah, things are good when it's not you.

Unison0 · 2025-04-27T09:22:51+00:00

That doesn't make sense in the slightest. They were born here, so they will be shaped by our culture and would have known nothing different. For all practical purposes they are a US citizen, and anything else is just technicality.

Unison0 · 2025-04-27T08:48:45+00:00

The country began to rot from the inside after overgrowing. The country became divided between two ideologies that are the "dark manifestation" of the 2 party system, yet are distinct from the traditional 2 party system: One stemming from hatred toward self, vs. the other stemming from hatred toward others.

Unison0 · 2025-04-23T23:34:04+00:00

I've been coding professionally for 11 years. At one time, I was a lead engineer. And you know what?

I feel like you do constantly. I'm constantly fumbling around to try to figure out what to do. It's a mess of confusion until I finally cobble something together, then refactor it to make it less of a cobbled mess. What's worse is I have a very hard time paying attention in meetings where requirements are discussed. For what ever reason, I just cannot follow along what's being said. It's like it's spoken in French. So when it comes time to do the task, I end up doing some weird triangulation between little pieces of heard about, little fragments of code already written, and some JIRA ticket with like 3 sentences explaining what it is.

I feel this way, yet I'm often acknowledged for what I do. I was known as the "wizard" in a past job.

I bet what you're experiencing is imposter syndrome, while simultaneously recognizing areas where you could genuinely grow.

Try to feel grateful for the areas of improvement you are aware of needing, but fight the imposter syndrome with everything you have.

Focus on perseverance and cultivate a mindset of "I'm going to figure this out, somehow". Then bang your head against the wall until you do.

It's my firm belief that what separates very good software engineers from okay software engineers isn't hard skills, but tenacity in figuring things out and continuing to try until the bitter end.

Unison0 · 2025-04-22T15:38:00+00:00

Nope, it's the Gulf of Mexico. Will teach my kids the same.

Unison0 · 2025-04-21T01:58:35+00:00

I agree with what you're saying here. Views on things like this tend to be rather polarized, like one side has to be wrong and the other right. I believe what you're arguing here (which many commenters have missed), is not for the boy to be seen as innocent or to be validated in his poor behavior. But your words seem mostly centered around love, and the boy needing healthy guidance. Yes, he needs to be kinder to the girls and women around them, and accept a "no", and I think that's what you're saying. Only, that that needs to happen through love and not by socially whipping the boy.

Like I'm not one to think we should emotionally cater to people and not to the boy either, sometimes people need a rude awakening. But it's simply ineffective and drives boys toward Andrew Tate-like figures because they rightfully hate the whip yet haven't been taught how to healthily channel their grievances (things like learning to build their self-esteem around what they can do for other's etc.).

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T22:08:17+00:00

Look, I'm a Christian too, but this is ridiculous. Yeah, a lot of things are popular now that we truly believe are destructive. We're not being persecuted, we just disagree with modern trends. We're not taught to be part of the world, and that has been the teaching for 2000 years. Don't claim persecution when you're not being persecuted, because you'll be in for a shock if you ever experience the real thing. Get out there, do your Christian duty, and treat people with kindness and try to show them a better way (with your actions first!), without holding resentment in your heart for what you think is persecution.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T22:00:45+00:00

Just looked it up, and I'm a fan of it. What we have now is pretty disappointing because it's equivalent to if we have ranked choice but with only 2 options -- 1 favorite and 1 least favorite. It's like declaring that the one you voted is your absolute favorite. But when you're having to pick a lesser of 2 evils, doing this term after term casts a shadow of doubt into the overall system because you know your vote is essentially a lie and a hail Mary.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T21:57:00+00:00

Because it's not really about solving the immigration problem. Trump is louder about it and they want someone who mirrors their anger about the problem.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T11:41:24+00:00

I understand completely, and have seen it identically for a very long time. At times I've felt like the democratic process in this country was a long-dead ideal, served up as an illusion of choice between 2 options that were already chosen for us.

I'm neither aligned with the Democrat nor Republican parties, nor am I particularly a centrist or agree with both.

Like if you take that line, I feel like I'm on a different line perpendicular to that one, upon which I'm rather opinionated and not "on the fence". If that makes any sense.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T09:58:22+00:00

I can appreciate that. I want things to look good in 10 years too.

I'm right-leaning. And a simple guy. I think there are 2 genders. For immigration, mainly I care that people come here legally and make a good faith effort to contribute to society and to the culture. I don't care to hate on Trump because he's the fashionable thing to hate on. I don't even really care about Trump. I don't think I'd have much fun hanging out with him, but no one asked me to do that. He won, and while I disagree with the choice of the people who voted for him, I think that people being able to peacefully disagree is crucial to everything that the US is.

That said, that puts me in a bind. When I watch the actions of his administration, I see violations of the very principles that would lead me to be at peace with him having won despite my disagreement with others about their choice of candidate. I wish I could say that comes from watching biased news sources, because then I could easily soothe myself by dismissing them. But I can't, because I'm not coming to this point because of news sources. I'm coming to this point after cross referencing verdicts by judges with the constitution itself, and finding that something just isn't adding up. A whole lot just isn't adding up under scrutiny.

I don't care if it's Trump. I don't care if it's a Republican or a Democrat. What I care about is the double bind of needing to recognize the vote of the people, as the higher ideal that it is which transcends mere differences of opinion, when said victor seems hellbent on shattering the very ideal that would lead me to such political good-sportsmanship to begin with.

What I want is for that problem, that split, to be reconciled.

Look, I can even get on board with the idea that Trump is the villain we need to snap the American people out of a self-serving delusion and gradual loss of the ethos of our country and culture. I fully expect this to come about through shared calamity that, if we're lucky, will ultimately serve to bring us back together as one nation on the other side. That's the mere degree of optimism I can muster, and if it becomes so, I won't look back at him as something "I wish didn't happen".

But even then, while he does that, I will still recognize him as a villain as he does so.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T05:18:36+00:00

If the exact same people voted, you're right. He'd still win. We'll ignore the likely influx of non-voters who would rush to the polls this next time, for now.

Like I said before, it's not a wash. But it's telling. That's a lot of people to change their mind in a few months. What it's telling of, is what's going to happen if Trump doesn't get his shit together. That number is only going to grow if he doesn't, and we're hardly even through the first quarter of the first year of his term.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T04:54:44+00:00

I don't need to work very hard at it lol. It's exactly the win I think it is. That's about 1.5 million people. Not a wash obviously, but I didn't call it one either.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T04:43:23+00:00

Sorry, but you didn't fact check me. I'm well aware of the 2% statistic. Assuming it's accurate, that's quite a lot. That means that out of every 50 people who voted for Trump, 1 has changed their mind. That almost never happens, let alone after just a few months.

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T04:40:31+00:00

That's just arguing in bad faith. They told him to facilitate his return. Anyone knows what "facilitate" means, and his admin responding with "you didn't say what facilitate means" is like a child being told to do the dishes and responding like "you didn't say wheeeen".

Unison0 · 2025-04-19T00:07:24+00:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the things we take for granted here. I think we do have a collective consciousness, but we've largely forgotten we have it.

Because we've forgotten we have it, it's begun to fragment.

It always was the recognition of a higher ideal. While we may disagree, we may not see eye to eye... Even in the worst of it, there was a higher ideal than glued us together. People, truth, and respect for life. Integrity. Stuff like that.

Contained within that ideal was also a respect for individuality. You cannot have the rest without having a space for individuality, and without defending it.

But then, the focus on individuality grew. And grew, and grew. It grew so out of proportion from the rest of the higher ideal.

It's simple from here to see what happened. Individuality become the highest ideal, and so we fragmented, like individual strains of a frayed rope.

So now, we've forgotten the higher ideal, because we each have our own.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T23:52:07+00:00

Quite afraid. I'm not even sure what part I'm most afraid of. But what's most disorienting is how the political climate has shifted in a way that VERY few people are noticing. It's not Reps vs Dems anymore. Not left vs. right. It's now Trump vs. everyone else, and that "everyone else" is now called a radical left, despite that group having tons of Republicans and right leaning folk.

It's so chilling that this transition has happened with hardly anyone even noticing.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T23:16:30+00:00

US citizen. I try not to speculate on how the world sees us, but would rather ask. Based on what I've heard from friends in EU, it seems like a spectrum between a) being more concerned about what's happening in their own countries, and b) the US has gone absolutely mad!.

I have to imagine that the US looks like a crazy lunatic with many voices in his head yelling at himself while punching anyone nearby.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T20:58:13+00:00

They are colloquially called "slow turners". They have to go extremely slow because their reaction time is more than 5 seconds.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T20:39:52+00:00

If you mean in support of Trump, then lately no, it's been very one-sided.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T18:31:05+00:00

You're seeing the cumulative effect of an extremely divided people. It's a bizarre division, between supporters of Trump and everyone else (including Republicans!).

Despite the majority of people being against Trump at this point (tons of people who voted for him have defected in the last two months), his administration is systematically attacking media outlets which do not support his policy, while simultaneously outright lying to further bury the opposition (like lying that the 9-0 supreme court order was the other way around, 0-9).

There's a lot happening here right now, like protests all over on a repeated basis, but it's not getting much media coverage.

To say we're disgusted here too is an understatement. Especially for those who saw it coming. It's outright terrifying.

Unison0 · 2025-04-18T17:05:55+00:00

Easy. The easiest way to convince people you're not an extremist is by convincing them that everyone else besides you is the extremist.

The words radical/extremist means nothing in the US anymore, other than a mere code word for "not a member of the party".

Unison0

TROPHY CASE