Script rules?

[East Xibeiguo]

So, when does this rule come into effect? I'm eager to start typing up a recruitment bot.

[Christian Democrats]

How are you going to identify the scripts compared to a team of active manual recruiters / message senders?

People don't send messages at regular intervals (e.g., exactly one message every x seconds).

[Aurora Nova]

How are you going to identify the scripts compared to a team of active manual recruiters / message senders?

People don't send messages at regular intervals (e.g., exactly one message every x seconds).

To be fair, scripts don't have to be that rigid, either.

[Nullarni]

So, when does this rule come into effect? I'm eager to start typing up a recruitment bot.

Be sure to send me a copy of your bot. I lack the skills required to write one...

[Riemstagrad]

to add my concerns:

10 requests per minute is very slow if one wants to log in to his puppets (a login gives me the world rankings of puppets and let's me check if there are issues waiting or if there are new telegrams, and it keeps them alive ).
the next step is downloading new telegrams, if any (depends on the spamweather of the day, but on average, 4 puppets per day receive telegrams, so that's does not count.
next i want to do issues. that requires me to download the issue-page for every puppets, then answer the issues for every puppet. since i can do 2 issues per day, that means 3 extra request per puppet.

for 100 puppets that means: 100 logins, 300 issue-related requests ==> 40 minutes. i have more puppets, so it will take a really long time.

now, i understand that you want to push people to use the API, but the "login-do-issues"-scripts can't go via the API and are with the proposed restriction of 10/minute severly punished, while they're actually non-violent information-gathering tools.

a bit slower doesn't bother me, 1 per second, or even 1 per 2 seconds seems reasonable while still far from the very fast API.

if issue-answering could somehow be done via the API, everything would be OK of course...



about telegrams: i'm indeed afraid that we're not flooded with spam, because it's costly to flood people with spam today.
when looking in my e-mail inbox, or my good old aluminium mailbox, or in some other games, it seems that we will become flooded with spam when it become cheap to flood people with spam. (maybe with the TG overhaul add a "junk-folder" and require all recruiters to check a 'this is recruitement-junk'-box when sending TG's... but that's another discussion i guess)

[[violet]]

I mentioned earlier that I won't require scripters to run slow if you've requested an API but I haven't provided it yet.

Regarding the above scenario, why not read the nation's private RSS feed to check for telegrams and new issues? I think that would give you the data you want in fewer requests. You wouldn't even need to log in until the feed tells you there is something there to process.

[[violet]]

New API stuff!.

[New South Hell]

Thank you for the wcensus shard. In the interests of getting rid of a few more html calls, I'd also like to ask for an API to return the following info for the world: The name of the current ranking, and the number of nations that were ranked by it (that is, how many there are in the list, not including new nations or excluding nations that have CTE'd in the meantime).

I'm not using it now, but I'd also like to be able to get the name of the featured region. This might allow me to prevent future embarrassment when one of my regions is featured and I don't even notice!

It only takes 12 seconds to get this info at the proposed rate maximum, but I could now be getting the rankings of 20 nations in that amount of time...

[[violet]]

Thank you for the wcensus shard. In the interests of getting rid of a few more html calls, I'd also like to ask for an API to return the following info for the world: The name of the current ranking, and the number of nations that were ranked by it (that is, how many there are in the list, not including new nations or excluding nations that have CTE'd in the meantime).

I'm not using it now, but I'd also like to be able to get the name of the featured region. This might allow me to prevent future embarrassment when one of my regions is featured and I don't even notice!

I've added a "World API" (see documentation). This what you need?

[New South Hell]

Sure is. *blows a kiss*

[Nullarni]

I really hate to gravedig, but are the "proposed" rules that [violet] gave us now law? I would really like to know because I have a secret project that I would like to work on if they are now in effect.

[[violet]]

Just want to run it by SalusaSecondus, then we should be good to go.

[Nullarni]

Thanks for the response. I eagerly await the result.

[Ballotonia]

Just dawned on me, and I wanted to clarify... when these rules go in effect it also ends it being forbidden to use a script to pull information from the NS Forum?

Ballotonia

[[violet]]

Who's scraping the forum? And yes.

[Ballotonia]

Who's scraping the forum? And yes.

Right now, nobody I know of. It's illegal at the moment. But it seems that latter part is about to change.

And thank you.

Ballotonia

[[violet]]

Sorry, I misread your original question as "ends up being forbidden." I don't want forum scrapers; we can't service them. Won't be supporting those.

[Solm]

Just want to run it by SalusaSecondus, then we should be good to go.

Any news on SalusaSecondus's thoughts?

[Fischistan]

I think this the right thread to suggest this, so could you put on the api if they have set their capital/leader/religion? And also, perhaps the new legislation they have passed? I'm thinking something like this:

Code: Select all

<nation id="testlandia">
...
<newlegislation>
     <legislation time="6 hours ago">
     the new harry potter book is a best-seller
     </legislation>
</newlegislation>
<has_set_capitol>true</has_set_capitol>
<has_set_leader>true</has_set_leader>
<has_set_faith>false</has_set_faith>
</nation>


[Glen-Rhodes]

I think this the right thread to suggest this, so could you put on the api if they have set their capital/leader/religion? And also, perhaps the new legislation they have passed? I'm thinking something like this:

If this is for a script, then you should be able to determine all those things for yourself, shouldn't you? As far as I can tell, the last paragraph in the description has recently passed legislation effects. But I guess that's not in the API, so you'd have to scrape it. But to check if a nation has set certain customizables, you should be able to just look and see if they're in the XML on your end.

[Fischistan]

I'm doing this in visual basic (so I think that makes it not a script), and I don't know how to derive information from the spotlight page. Does anyone here know how?

[[violet]]

Don't scrape the spotlight page! I will put it in the API.

[[violet]]

And done: added customleader, customreligion, customcapital, legislation shards. See API documentation for examples.

[[violet]]

Just want to run it by SalusaSecondus, then we should be good to go.

Any news on SalusaSecondus's thoughts?

No, so we'll just do it. I'll make the change next week.

[Ballotonia]

Can we also have a way to get a list of all WA nations in a region? That would save having to pull all the nation list pages when running an endochecker.

Example, TEP (using recent numbers):
Nations: 4267, UN:418
Running through the list of nations to build a list of all WA nations: 4267 / 14 = 305 calls to HTML pages. (using 14 instead of 15 to detect nations leaving/entering)
Then actual endorsement counting: 418 XML shards.

Ofcourse, if it would be possible to combine shards of multiple nations into one call, that would be awesome!

Ballotonia