As you may know, NationStates periodically has a novelty day, like the zombie invasion last Halloween, the April Fools days, and the Ten Year Anniversary. Often these days feature some kind of mini-game.
The last two novelty days in particular have been abused by a small number of individuals who write bots to cheat the system. These bots break our Script Rules in order to gain an advantage for the author.
In the past, I've let this things slide, because I'm too busy to chase it down during the day, and it seems churlish to punish people afterward, when I have time to go through the logs. The days are, after all, supposed to be fun.
But it's also disheartening to put this work into novelty days only to have people take the top rankings by cheating. And it's unfair on everyone who plays by the rules.
So if you are script-inclined, please take this as a final warning that I will be banning accounts for breaking site rules during a novelty day, even if I don't get around to examining the evidence until weeks or months later.
Script Rules wrote:It is illegal to use a tool to automatically cause something in the gameworld to change, other than your own nation. Examples include: moving regions, sending a telegram to another nation, banning a nation from a region, creating a nation, and endorsing another nation. These are referred to below as "restricted actions."
A tool is working "automatically" if it executes a restricted action in any way other than by immediately responding to a user's mouse click (or similar input) at the ratio of one click to one action. For example, a tool that sends ban requests to the server at five-second intervals, regardless of user input, is executing restricted actions automatically, and is illegal. However, a tool that makes ban buttons appear on pages where they aren't normally present is legal, as this requires a user's click to change anything in the gameworld.
A tool may never execute restricted actions simultaneously. It must wait for the completion of each command--a complete response from the NationStates server--before issuing the next one. A tool should never spawn background processes to enable multiple simultaneous server connections that each perform a restricted action.
You may use a tool to execute actions that only affect your own nation, such as answering issues or changing custom fields.
Scripts must send no more than 10 requests per minute.
)
