Captchas when answering individual issues

[Bharat Desham]

Multiple people have encountered this while card farming.
Is this designed to be another anti-mass issue answering thing" or "Is this due to a certain someone cheating using scripts

[Neo Lunatea]

It just looks like a captcha. Not much else to say tbh

[New Kowloon Bay]

I wonder if this is another anti-mass issue answering thing targeting card farmers.

[Ayuzhhhhh]

A thing which we must figure out- does the captcha appears only for only selective numbered issues or is it random?

For ex- this phenomenon takes place only for issue no. #105,#254,#568,#909,#1616. (This is just an example)

[United Calanworie]

This is intended behavior.

As of right now, players who are humanly answering issues should basically never see a captcha. Players who are high-speed card-farming legally will as of right now, on average, see about one captcha every 20-30 minutes.

[Mammoth Cave]

I wonder if this is another anti-mass issue answering thing targeting card farmers.

We had a major card farmer deleted last year for automating card farming in a rather blatant if unintentional violation of script rules, and another more recently puppetswept for doing the same. Feels like a natural progression to this.

Cheating in the cards game is already selfish, but when it means I, a humble, rule-abiding S4 farmer must answer CAPTCHAs? Come on!

[[violet]]

Humble rule-abiding card farmers benefit from measures like this, which combat cheating from fully automated scripts, and help preserve the value of your cards.

High-speed issue answerers may encounter some new captchas like this, but they're easily bypassed by real humans.

[Omnicontrol]

Humble rule-abiding card farmers benefit from measures like this, which combat cheating from fully automated scripts, and help preserve the value of your cards.

High-speed issue answerers may encounter some new captchas like this, but they're easily bypassed by real humans.

This humble rule-abiding card farmer would like these changes which supposedly "benefit" her to be at least announced before they happen so we don't have to find out about this on the go after 1/10th of our issues automatically get closed before they can *actually* be answered and we have to go draft the script makers to make an emergency fix. You know, a Technical post going "we're introducing CAPTCHAs in two days" would've gone a long way to giving us some leeway to keep our legal scripts working instead of having to push hotfixes after an unannounced change.

Or you could change the card generation method. Maybe that'd fix the two biggest issues with Cards (the server load, and no one liking having to spam Enter for an hour). But apparently the people who make a nation, spend 20 minutes playing the game, and then never touch the game again MUST know how to get cards immediately and MUST be prioritized over the people actually playing every day and even spending money on this site.

[Mammoth Cave]

Or you could change the card generation method. Maybe that'd fix the two biggest issues with Cards (the server load, and no one liking having to spam Enter for an hour). But apparently the people who make a nation, spend 20 minutes playing the game, and then never touch the game again MUST know how to get cards immediately and MUST be prioritized over the people actually playing every day and even spending money on this site.

I thought it was understood that this topic would be taken up again after the introduction of the accounts system, but I could be misremembering things.

Also, speaking as one of those players who spends more than 20 minutes playing NS a day, I feel M/A should be catering to the "silent majority" when making technical decisions. Anything that supports new player activity is generally good for all of us. I think if eight years ago, the cards system were tucked away in some small obscure corner of the site, like the challenge game, or NS trivia, we'd have lost many great cards players, some of whom went on to do fun things on other parts of the site, too!

[United Calanworie]

The Bad Faith standard is now in effect in this thread. As a reminder, this is what the Bad Faith standard means:

Bad Faith: It is expected that players post with the intent of making the site a better, more enjoyable place to be - this is good faith posting. Bad faith posting is when a person is no longer interested in this goal, and instead seeks to score points, contributes nothing useful, or is deceitful.
[...]
Where this rule is enforced, posts that violate this standard will be removed from the thread to the "Evidence Locker", so the removal can be reviewed by other Moderators if necessary. Players will not be otherwise punished for posting in Bad Faith; however, please note that repeated Bad Faith posting may cross over into spam, flaming or trolling.

The above post by Omnicontrol will not be removed with the declaration of this standard but any further posts in that vein are likely to be.

-- United Calanworie
Technical Moderator

[Kractero]

Fair and reasonable change, regardless on if it was pre-planned and accelerated because of the JnJ thing or brought on by the JnJ thing. Punish vibe-coded scripts to the full extend of the law.

For farmers:
I can confirm it is every 20-30 minutes. As likely the main farmer with the highest quantity of farming puppets, from experience if you skip the captcha whether due to auto-closing or testing, you will be absolutely sent to hell and back with captchas until you complete one, so just complete it. Native image off (about:config, Brave's setting, however you do it in other browsers) as usual causes the captcha to fail.

[[violet]]

changes which supposedly "benefit" her to be at least announced before they happen so we don't have to find out about this on the go after 1/10th of our issues automatically get closed

1. Announcing anti-cheat measures in advance would let cheats prepare and avoid being detected by them.

2. There's a lockout component to this that isn't activated yet so that legal card farmers can use this time to adjust rather than be caught by it. At the moment, if you're using a workflow that causes you to spam issue-answering requests at the HTML site even though each one is clearly being rejected, there is no penalty -- because I know some legal tools today can lead that that. But in the future, it will trigger a cooldown, because that behavior is typical of illegal full automation scripts.

3. The site didn't automatically close anything; your tool did that. Unfortunately it's a practical reality that any third-party tool that interacts with the HTML site is liable to be broken by any change to the site, because it tries to hook into components that aren't stable (unlike the API).

[Merethin]

Agreed with Kractero that this is a reasonable change. Having to click a captcha every so often, with the delay provided above, is not a major inconvenience and I'll happily take it.

The implementation of it (captcha after selecting an option, but before enacting the issue) is also not hard to adapt to existing scripts/workflows, as it essentially only means that autocloser scripts need to stop when they encounter a captcha, to let the person solve it. I was able to come up with an adaptation for an existing autocloser script within an hour of getting to my hotel room yesterday, which was then refined by Kractero, and inserted into other autocloser variants.

Overall I see the need for this change and can imagine there would have been ways of implementing it that would've been a lot more disruptive to the cards community, so I appreciate the solution taken. Ultimately this has been disruptive for maybe a day while we figured stuff out and people can now farm normally again (given they update their scripts, at least). Thank you for the hard work as always!

Native image off (about:config, Brave's setting, however you do it in other browsers) as usual causes the captcha to fail.

As for this, it seems like blocking "nationstates.net/images/*" in UBlock Origin using a custom filter list gets rid of images just fine without failing the captcha.

[Llan]

I feel thats it’s hard to card farm without scripts since it requires multiple logins, rapid fire issue answering, is there a way we can could amend this or make it a bit easier to card farm?

[[violet]]

I feel thats it’s hard to card farm without scripts since it requires multiple logins, rapid fire issue answering, is there a way we can could amend this or make it a bit easier to card farm?

Accounts (coming soon*) will make nation switching much easier, including rotating between nations while staying on the Issues page.

[Furballland]

That's good, but pretty unexpected, so I must watch closer now so I wouldn't miss even a single issue while card farming since that Captcha issue answering is now a thing.