added recaptcha to the site

To combat the massive number of bots swarming the blog, i realized after someone who i suspect was a bot, asked about reCaptcha.
So i downloaded this plugin https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-nocaptcha-recaptcha/

It occured to me that this would be vastly more effective than trying to parse keywords or use any sort of paid service. this uses googles captcha, i have read it uses google services that track the users activity and analyzes whether they are human or not, and if it triggers any flags, one of them i believe being even just using a VPN (bot armies need to run off VPNs usually), it forces the person to do one of those tests where you click on the image containing a bike or road sign.

All bots are at least somewhat suspicious and google internally takes notice of IPs where bot behaviour is detected, and for good reason, this isnt about being creepy big brother, bots can be used to produce false ad revenue. ignoring ad clicks, simply viewing a page with ads on it earns the host revenue, now imagine you have a botnet army, that is, several thousand malware infected computers you can freely control and have perform background operations. tell each one twice a day to simply open a page in an invisible browser from each supported affiliate site, and over 50 affiliates, you got yourself 100K pageviews per day, 100K ad views, or potentially 100K ad clicks. cost per clicks on ads can be something like 10-40 cents. in 1 day, if you create 50 random sites with ads, then control a botnet to have them all click on the ads, you could make 40K in a single day tricking google into thinking real people clicked those ads.

the solution? invisible captcha, google monitors the activity and can determine when behaviour changes, some online games like runescape use this to catch out bot accounts as well farming money and equipment, disrupting the in game economy and/or selling game currency.

Thats a little background on captcha, if your own wordpress blog or other site is having a ton of spammy comments (i get about 200 a month, or, got that is) try a simple reCaptcha, for most people most of the time, you click the “i am not a robot”, it tells you arent, and thats it, done, but now and then it might make you click on some pictures, taking a whole 10 seconds of your time, it inconveniences nobody.

I highly recommend it, especially over a paid parsing system that excludes comments based on keywords, for the time being i am disabling all content restrictions so commenters can freely link me images again.

Custom Nintendo Switch-duino controller

I recently took up playing animal crossing to relax, and surprisingly it worked, normally games are not a healthy distraction from my studies, but this game genuinely does relax me, or it did. One of the major issues and great stresses of animal crossing is the lack of a “craft multiple items” feature when crafting items. Everything gets crafted 1 at a time, with an individual long animation between each instance, fortunately there is a “craft again” dialogue that pops up afterwards so you just have to mash the “A” button, but its annoying and time consuming, though if you seriously mash the “A” button repeatedly the animation speed doubles which is good.

Anyway, you might see this feature pop up in memes, people really wanted it added, it is good for making money (every day a random craftable item like furniture) becomes very valuable to sell, its quite useful early on in the game for making some capital, and later in the game making fish bait is still annoying to make to the extent many people dont even bother anymore. There are other games that run into similar problems, and im sure some people could find creative applications if they could run macros or repeaters, which has brought on my newest project.

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