Wcsv - Robo Wiki -= Collecting Robocode Knowledge =-

I'm a Computer Engineering student from Philadelphia, USA. I've written several bots:

PowerHouse2 - (temporary name until I think of a better one)

PowerHouse - A competitive one on one bot using GF targeting and wavesurfing movement.

Engineer - A faily competitive, experimental bot. It uses Kohonen Feature Maps for targeting and movement.

Stampede, Stampede2 are my first two bots.

You're in 'Drinker House'? Sounds like a party university. -- Martin

Martin, i've gotta ask, how did you find that out? just curious. --wcsv
- I think I inferred your college and student ID from your upload directory, and a few minutes of research gave me your full name and some other details. Scary stuff. -- Martin

Eh, a bit. 'Drinker' is actually the last name of someone who gave the school a bunch of money, so they named a residence hall after him. I admit, it is a bit of an unfortunate name for a college dorm though... --wcsv

Hey, it might be better to just wait for PEZ to lock the wiki. It looks like a lot of these pages are starting to repeat. Sorry, but I have to go to class now so I can't help anymore. --wcsv

You are right, I have to go to bed, in 5 hours I have to get up again. I hope PEZ has nothing else to do coming weekend. -- GrubbmGait

You guys probably missed my comment, but I bet a script of some sort could revert the pages, and hopefully PEZ will have some solution to prevent future attacks, at least from this particular Wiki-spammer. I also have some stuff to do tonight, namely a research paper and studying for an exam, otherwise I would have chipped in a bit more on the maintenance... -- Voidious

After about an hour, I realized that this is pointless, as we're probably the target of some lame bot: thus it can go on and on forever :( --UnderDark

Most definitely. I'm sure PEZ will have some idea what course of action to take. -- Voidious

I have not been around much lately, mostly due to a very intense semester at school, but the semester is over now so I'm restarting work on my bots. My first task is a total rewrite of PowerHouse, the code has just become too unweildy for me to deal with, hopefully after that I'll be able to make some actual performance improvements to it. --wcsv

OK, I'm back. It's been a while but now i'm nearly done with the above task. There are still a few more things that I need to work on and the wavesurfing needs more tuning, but the main structures and functionality are all there. The new design is much more modular and will be far easier to modify (maybe this time i'll even get around to adding a movement flattener). Anyway, the first version should be out soon although I don't expect it to perform as well as its predecessor at first. --wcsv

Hey, glad to see you're still around. A killer MiniBot in WeeksOnEnd and WaveSerpent solidifying its #4 spot in General 1v1 come to mind as a couple of the bigger things you may have missed, along with several new members of The2000Club. We just started revisiting the TargetingChallenge2K7, so maybe we can get that going soon; speaking of which, I'd personally love to see a movement only version of Engineer to be considered for the challenge, and PowerHouse, too, of course. I'd gladly run the battles for the TargetingChallenge2K7/Results page if you posted 'em, but of course it's up to you to decide if you'd like us all tuning our guns against your bots ;) -- Voidious

Ahh, you're the brains behind Engineer, eh? Very nice bot. Even nicer name :). Engineer crushes my bot hard, I know that much. -- Simonton

Very cool to see a new bot from you! I'll have two clients going the rest of the night, so hopefully it should get its battles soon. I look forward to hearing what's new in this one. Good luck =) -- Voidious

Hey thanks, I know I've been away for a while; the last two semesters have been pretty brutal as far as workload. Basically this is the rewrite of Powerhouse that I mentioned a while ago. Right now I'm just testing the new structure, the GF gun and WS movement are *very* basic at the moment so I don't expect to even break 2k with this release. Once I know that the basic structure is working i'll flesh out the movement and gun, then maybe work on another experimental gun like the one I used in Engineer. I've been doing a lot of reading and research on machine learning techniques, so I hope to be able to come up with something effective. This new structure was also built with melee and team battles in mind, so it should be fairly straightforward to add functionality for those two types of battles as well. --wcsv

Sheesh, I was just about to revert the vandalism on this page when I discovered Voidious had already done it - while I was copying the old text! Is it just me, or has there been a spike in vandalism all of a sudden? -- AaronR

Yeah, a minor spike, before the consciousness check it was slightly worse ;-) . Btw, you don't have to copy the old text, just edit the last version without vandalism (adding and removing a space will do) and the page is back in bussiness. -- GrubbmGait

Funny, it seems to be hitting certain pages only. This must be the 5th or 6th time Wcsv has been changed. -- Skilgannon

Yes, it's mostly this page, DynamicSegmentation?, and Corbos. Weird... -- AaronR

This is insane. It is obvious that the same spambot is hitting us every time, and it always follows the same format. Is there any way we can specifically block changes that replace a page with a single paragraph and an external link? -- AaronR

There is a banned list of which I don't know if it is active at the moment. It will only partly solve the problem though. Till now the consciousness check was good enough, but is seems there is a way to get past it (if it is a bot, it could also be a person!) -- GrubbmGait

I seriously doubt it is a person. It is just too regular in its format and the pages it hits. Also, we've been discussing it on this page, but that hasn't changed its behavior at all. The banned list wouldn't work completely, since it sometimes accesses the wiki through different addresses; it might be spoofing its IP address. Finally, if it can detect the consciousness check, extracting the expression and evaluating it would be almost trivial. (Consciousness check: 10 * 4 = <input type="text" name="capAnswer" size="3" maxlength="3" /> look familiar, anyone?) -- AaronR

We could do something I did on my site to subvert the annoying spambots. Add a 'fake' captcha, hide it via css(imported of course :)), if it gets filled in (and a bot will fill it in) claim it succeeded, but don't actually do anything. I find this trick increadibly hilarious. --Chase-san

With this trick we could technically just remove the normal captcha all togeather, as all bots I have seen fill in every field. But i'm not sure if thats a risk that we would like to take. --Chase-san

Then there is this thing I call the fake 'fake' captcha, for the really smart bots, I hide it via css in the style tag, but in the import I add display: block !important; This one isn't as useful, as most bots aren't that smart, and it annoys people on older browsers. --Chase-san

It might not be interpreting the captcha, it might just fill in the same value every time (like "1") and be right 1 out of 100 times (or whatever it averages out to). There is a ban list, but yeah, it's from a different IP each time. I can and will edit the UseMod? Perl code to detect this specific paragraph if it keeps up... -- Voidious

What it could be doing is cycling through every number from 1 to 100 and trying that in the input field. Either way, we could block its edits by stopping anything that makes the same changes and gets the consciousness check wrong, say, 5 times in a row. Of course, that wouldn't stop it if it really can evaluate the equation. -- AaronR

Why not...just do what wikipedia does, and 'lock' pages for editing unless your a member or something (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_metal)@ or migrate the (targeted) spammed pages to the new wiki and just do stuff there? OR block edits that contain the phrase "Hello! Good site! Thanks you!" --Starrynte (lol, in a bot I was making I added ONE SINGLE digit and its score like tripled...)

I think the "Hello! Good site!" thing is a different bot. Also, you can't really block "non-members" since all you have to do to get a username is edit your Preferences page. -- AaronR

But you can still do it...because look the bots don't really have a username, as you can see from this portion of 'other revisions' on corbos's page:

	Revision 41 . . (edit) November 24, 2007 9:18 by GrubbmGait [reverting (again)]
	Revision 40 . . (edit) November 24, 2007 7:43 by customer-148-223-98-37.uninet-ide.com.mx
	Revision 39 . . (edit) November 22, 2007 9:38 by Voidious [reverting vandalism]
	Revision 38 . . (edit) November 22, 2007 8:32 by 62.81.156.98.static.user.ono.com
	Revision 37 . . (edit) November 21, 2007 10:18 by Voidious [reverting vandalism]
	Revision 36 . . (edit) November 21, 2007 6:21 by 217-159-190-94-dsl.est.estpak.ee
	Revision 35 . . (edit) November 15, 2007 6:26 by Voidious [reverting vandalism]
	Revision 34 . . (edit) November 15, 2007 6:16 by gw-bin.nw.ru
	Revision 33 . . (edit) October 12, 2007 10:39 by Voidious [reverting vandalism]
	Revision 30 . . (edit) October 8, 2007 21:27 by 212.72.30.140

It's a ... pretty eaten-up-by-spam page :( the targets thing definitely is true --Starrynte

One thing we could do is disable minor edits by users with no username. It always marks its changes as minor edits and leaves no edit summary. Come to think of it, we could just force people to leave a summary - not that that would be a bad thing anyway. -- AaronR