The new update to PSNP kills the functionality of third party services. Is this intended?

[MidnightDragon]

Maybe he just wanted to keep it up for a bit just in case someone tried to screw with the site again. At least it seems to be gone for now.

[HusKy]

I just got transferred through CF again.

[Sly Ripper]

There's just too many bots hitting the site sometimes

[zombie_ninja_X]

YuriG is the only one Sly replies to. ?

[Sora_Bug]

5 minutes ago, Sly Ripper said:

There's just too many bots hitting the site sometimes

We understand there are a lot out there, but couldn't you have a whitelist for specifically approved bots? I know Cowbear in particular has events run monthly wherein the winners are gifted PSNP Premium. It helps fund the site. Surely you can devise some type of API limiter for approved bots to make calls that wont take everything down... 

 

If that truly cannot be done, can the PSNP bot be allowed in other servers as Yuri suggested?

 

All and all, the use of Yura and Cowbear drive people to your page upping your clicks, views and ad revenue.. Countless individuals arbitarily join trophy hunting discord servers, see those bots, try to use them, find out about PSNP and sign up. Seems silly to shut off avenues of web traffic for you over this. 

[MidnightDragon]

That’s too bad.

[Froopy the Temmie]

I honestly had a feeling that's why this was done in the first place.  Some bot programmer friends of mine had ran into the same exact issue with fanfiction.net when they ramped up CF to uber mode.  I get why it was done and understand it, as much as it's a bummer.

I'm glad I was able to serve the community as long as I did.  The times I've had with the friends I met will be something I always deeply treasure.  I will attempt to find an alternate source.

[Zephyr-pt]

4 minutes ago, Sora_Bug said:

We understand there are a lot out there, but couldn't you have a whitelist for specifically approved bots? I know Cowbear in particular has events run monthly wherein the winners are gifted PSNP Premium. It helps fund the site. Surely you can devise some type of API limiter for approved bots to make calls that wont take everything down... 

 

If that truly cannot be done, can the PSNP bot be allowed in other servers as Yuri suggested?

 

All and all, the use of Yura and Cowbear drive people to your page upping your clicks, views and ad revenue.. Countless individuals arbitarily join trophy hunting discord servers, see those bots, try to use them, find out about PSNP and sign up. Seems silly to shut off avenues of web traffic for you over this. 

Accurate, i was a casual trophy hunter until 2021, had signed up on psnp back in 2015 but didn't care much about the site at all. After joining Plat Players last year and interacting with cowbear, causing me to update my psnp again, i actually started giving a damn about psnp.

I wanted to bring my completion up, my plat count up, my trophies per day count up and everyday i could easily check out my stats on discord using cowbear but also started checking my actual psnp page everyday and while i don't talk much i even started using the forums a bit and helped a friend make a guide for Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope.

None of that would have ever happened without my first few interactions with cowbear last year (and of course the community i met on discord) so it will be a pretty sad outcome if bots stop working altogether tbh.

[TheYuriG]

As long as this DDoS screening is active, I don't see either Yura or Cowbear being able to stay alive. It seems like we are getting whitelisted? Sly contacted me to get my IP address and have Yura able to go through PSNP ignoring the screening.

 

I also think this kills the ability of the forums to use websockets to fetch new posts on the current thread that you are viewing and to get notifications, provided you don't change pages (you stay idle) to refresh your cloudfare token. I'm fairly certain that PSNTL also uses Cloudfare but they don't seem to have this issue. Maybe the token validation expiration date for PSNP is too quick (like 15 minutes?) or maybe I'm having an isolated issue with it.

Edited December 12, 2022 by TheYuriG
possible whitelisting?

[Tearbaer]

I'm just curious why Sly and the PSNP team didn't speak with Froopy or Yuri in regards to this update breaking the bots before the update went live. Surely they knew, right? They couldn't have found a way around this together instead of just syphoning the revenue from their clicks and then tossing them aside.

Edited December 12, 2022 by Tearbaer

[Froopy the Temmie]

Sly has gotten with me and the bot is now whitelisted.  I'll be happy to provide this service to the community for as long as I can.  Just watching people enjoy the bot is a bright point in my days as it was created as a portfolio project that evolved into something that helped keep my love of programming from imploding due to work.

Thanks again, Sly

[MidnightDragon]

14 minutes ago, Tearbaer said:

I'm just curious why Sly and the PSNP team didn't speak with Froopy or Yuri in regards to this update breaking the bots before the update went live. Surely they knew, right? They couldn't have found a way around this together instead of just syphoning the revenue from their clicks and then tossing them aside.

Sly whitelisted Cowbear and Yura, so should be business as usual there.

Edited December 12, 2022 by MidnightDragon

[DeepEyes7]

[Dead Weight]

17 minutes ago, DeepEyes7 said:

 

They're discord bots made by Froopy and TheYuriG respectively. They access and display information from PSNP just like Sly's PSNP discord bot but Cowbear and Yura are more widely available on Discord servers that aren't the PSNProfiles discord server. They both have some features that aren't related to PSNP and trophies as well.

You can ask Froopy and Yuri more about them.

Edited December 12, 2022 by Dead Weight

[serrated-banner9]

38 minutes ago, DeepEyes7 said:

 

cowbear is the bot most known for being the one who automatically adds up the points for THL hosted by @Lucas and @Psy-Tychist

 

i have no experience with Yura so can't say anything

[MidnightDragon]

8 minutes ago, serrated-banner9 said:

 

cowbear is the bot most known for being the one who automatically adds up the points for THL hosted by @Lucas and @Psy-Tychist

 

i have no experience with Yura so can't say anything

Yura is the trophy Discord bot created by @TheYuriG

Edited December 12, 2022 by MidnightDragon

[Zephyr-pt]

Happy this was resolved<3

[Jelly Soup]

16 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have given up trying to make other trophy communities outside of this one, which I feel has gone down the tubes these past few years. 
 

PST.org is riddled with atrocious ads trying to gain your personal information (AdBlock doesn’t necessarily remove them). PSNTL is okayish, it has an actual leaderboards but that’s pretty much it.

 

Not that surprising, really. This is the oldest tracker community and it had the benefit of all the big names in trophy hunting right out the gate. There are other options out there, but they have issues too. Exophase is an option, put the tracking has a 50/50 chance of actually working. MetaGamerScore is an option, but the tracking takes weeks to work and Primal needs around seven years to fix anything. TrueTrophies is another, but the scoring is Who's Line style and the community bleeds salt. InfiniteBacklog is pretty good, but still needs work. At the moment, it's pretty much myspace with an achievement tracker.

 

I don't really see a reasonable replacement for what we have here popping up any time soon. 

[AJ_Radio]

11 minutes ago, Jelly Soup said:

Not that surprising, really. This is the oldest tracker community and it had the benefit of all the big names in trophy hunting right out the gate. There are other options out there, but they have issues too. Exophase is an option, put the tracking has a 50/50 chance of actually working. MetaGamerScore is an option, but the tracking takes weeks to work and Primal needs around seven years to fix anything. TrueTrophies is another, but the scoring is Who's Line style and the community bleeds salt. InfiniteBacklog is pretty good, but still needs work. At the moment, it's pretty much myspace with an achievement tracker.

 

I don't really see a reasonable replacement for what we have here popping up any time soon. 

PST.org dates back to 2008 when trophy hunting started. You can still view old posts if you look up the Dead Space 1 sub forums. 
 

PSNP I see was formed around 2010 - 2011, I don’t know exactly. Someone posted a while back the trophy tracker from late 2012, so it’s been in place for over a decade.

 

PSNTL is skewed because the owner has a bunch of hard sub 1 trophies that count as ‘prestige’. Also you have to pay money to get the full capabilities of their leaderboards, which I refuse to do. 
 

Discord is a private echo chamber. 
 

There’s really only a select few options. 

[ArmoredSnowman]

18 hours ago, r4tb0- said:

did quite a bit of research (and decompiling the ps app android apk) and programmed a trophytracker for my livestreams.

Don't supposed you looked into the user side of things? In the past, Gamstat imported hundreds of thousands of players into a database, directly via Sony's servers. He quit after getting blocked a lot, but it would've helped with something PS3-related back then. 

[Sifferino]

Look, the new DDOS protection completely disallows me to access the website on my iPad through Edge. I think it is pretty silly when I, a regular user, have to switch to a different browser to access a website. If I have these problems, I'm pretty sure I am not the only one. I don't think this is an acceptable side-effect. I mean, site owners worry about milliseconds in loading in terms of user experience, how is it acceptable that it now takes seconds to get redirected OR get stuck in an infinite redirect-loop and having to proof that I am in fact a human countless times, without any effect?

Edited December 13, 2022 by Sifferino

[DaivRules]

39 minutes ago, Sifferino said:

Look, the new DDOS protection completely disallows me to access the website on my iPad through Edge. I think it is pretty silly when I, a regular user, have to switch to a different browser to access a website. If I have these problems, I'm pretty sure I am not the only one. I don't think this is an acceptable side-effect. I mean, site owners worry about milliseconds in loading in terms of user experience, how is it acceptable that it now takes seconds to get redirected OR get stuck in an infinite redirect-loop and having to proof that I am in fact a human countless times, without any effect?

 

I don’t think Cloudflares DDOS protection discriminates at browser level (Edge vs Safari), is there something you have running in Edge that would block it? Like a VPN or extension running in Edge that isn’t running in Safari and that’s what’s getting blocked?

Im pretty certain there wasn’t a “Block all Edge users” rule implemented. Verified: I just used Edge on iOS and mine isn’t blocked. 

[HusKy]

2 hours ago, DaivRules said:

Verified: I just used Edge on iOS and mine isn’t blocked.

 

Works for me as well. Besides, all iOS browsers are reskinned Safari under the hood.

 

Though, it does break the forum. Not sure why it's enabled here too?

Edited December 13, 2022 by HusKy

[AJ_Radio]

On 12/13/2022 at 1:47 AM, Sifferino said:

Look, the new DDOS protection completely disallows me to access the website on my iPad through Edge. I think it is pretty silly when I, a regular user, have to switch to a different browser to access a website. If I have these problems, I'm pretty sure I am not the only one. I don't think this is an acceptable side-effect. I mean, site owners worry about milliseconds in loading in terms of user experience, how is it acceptable that it now takes seconds to get redirected OR get stuck in an infinite redirect-loop and having to proof that I am in fact a human countless times, without any effect?

 

Agreed. Couldn't of said this better myself.

[Sifferino]

On 13/12/2022 at 11:30 AM, DaivRules said:

 

I don’t think Cloudflares DDOS protection discriminates at browser level (Edge vs Safari), is there something you have running in Edge that would block it? Like a VPN or extension running in Edge that isn’t running in Safari and that’s what’s getting blocked?

Im pretty certain there wasn’t a “Block all Edge users” rule implemented. Verified: I just used Edge on iOS and mine isn’t blocked. 

I wasn’t talking about me specifically. The point I was trying to make, if it happens to me, with no special setup or anything, undoubtedly a percentage of visitors will run into something similar. Not good.

 

10 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

 

Agreed. Couldn't of said this better myself.

Thankfully, it seems to have been taken down again. Phew!

Edited December 14, 2022 by Sifferino