Originally Posted by
cyanide Well what I did is try to make it mimick my own vending patterns. Namely refreshing usually about twice a second, sometimes taking a few seconds to look at something more closely, sometimes taking half a minute to check facebook, sometimes taking a few minutes to talk to my roommate, etc. I tried to make it functionally indistinguishable from me sitting behind the keyboard.
I also used Adblock not only to speed things up, but also to block any outgoing AJAX requests because I'm paranoid like that (putting * on your block list will do that). I doubt Gaia will be putting anti-bot javascript into the marketplace any time soon but like I said, I'm paranoid. And even if they did, the bot dot doesn't do any of the easily detectable stuff like altering the DOM.
So assuming you can write delay code that reasonably mimicks a human being, and Gaia doesn't get ultra militant about marketplace bots, I think you should be ok. But botting is always risky of course. Personally I got to the point where I could afford almost anything I wanted and decided to stop because you never know when your time's up.
Oh also I'd definitely advise against browsing Gaia while running it. That would be some very fishy multitasking. Probably the safest thing to do if you're worried would be to run it for like half an hour, stop it, check your messages, sell some stuff, and start it up again.
And yes you definitely shouldn't have it refresh with a set time with no variation. The code that's in there by default is fairly similar to the code I used, and that has a ton of variation. If you want to do your own (which I would advise if you're able to), quick lesson:
wait_time = 700 + (Math.random()*2-1)*400;
That waits a random time between 300 and 1100 milliseconds. The 700 is your average wait time in milliseconds, and the 400 is the range. Math.random()*2-1 generates a uniform random number between -1 and 1.
Even better:
wait_time = 1500 + (Math.random()*2-1 + Math.random()*2-1 + Math.random()*2-1)*400;
This creates a normal distribution which is more natural and human than a uniform distribution (above). That should create a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 400 and a maximum deviation of 1200 (think bell-curve).