PHP bot stopped working due to CAPTCHA restrictions

[Aibohphobia]

Good day.

I have a PHP bot connected to the following nation: Aleator. It randomly picks responses to issues twice a day. It has recently stopped working, because the page is blocked by a CAPTCHA. I was wondering if there was anything I could do about it. If any information is needed on the bot, please let me know.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

[Darcania]

The NS API provides a method to answer issues programmatically: https://www.nationstates.net/pages/api. ... tecommands

[Aibohphobia]

The NS API provides a method to answer issues programmatically: https://www.nationstates.net/pages/api. ... tecommands

I know. The bot was written before the changes were introduced to the API, and the CAPTCHA issue only occured, like, yesterday.

[Eluvatar]

Generally speaking, once something is possible via API, we would like script authors to shift away from using HTML scraping.

This need not happen instantaneously, that'd be a bit rough, but scraping-based scripts are unsupported at the best of times.

All this being said, a cursory look has me very confused as to how your nation could get a CAPTCHA in issue selection. That should pretty much only happen for minigames, was my belief.

[Aibohphobia]

Generally speaking, once something is possible via API, we would like script authors to shift away from using HTML scraping.

This need not happen instantaneously, that'd be a bit rough, but scraping-based scripts are unsupported at the best of times.

All this being said, a cursory look has me very confused as to how your nation could get a CAPTCHA in issue selection. That should pretty much only happen for minigames, was my belief.

I was planning on doing it through the API eventually, but I have very little spare time during my days. Now I'm kind of forced into doing it anyway, so, I guess, I should've found the time before. I will let you know how it goes.

Yes, it was my belief as well. The CAPTCHA might be enforced by the hosting company though, I'm not sure. This is what it looks like:

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Update #0: trying to login through the API produces the same CAPTCHA page... I have no idea how to get around it if that's the case.

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Update #1: I have managed to produce a CAPTCHA response, but sending it to https://nationstates.net/cdn-cgi/l/chk_captcha (which, I am assuming, is where the validation script sits) produces a "302 Temporarily Moved". The CAPTCHA challenge seems to be tied to my server's IP address, as I am not getting it when logging into the nation normally, and it doesn't disappear if I create a new cookie for the bot. Neither POST nor GET works, and the "Location" header for the 302 page is simply root ("/"). I'm out of ideas.

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Update #2: the CAPTCHA is definitely tied to my server's IP address, as I have copied the cookie from the bot into my browser's storage, and there is no CAPTCHA challenge when viewing the pages within the browser.

[Aibohphobia]

Should I move this question to Stackoverflow or something? Or does someone with more knowledge and/or power have recommendations on how to deal with this problem?

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Should I move this question to Stackoverflow or something? Or does someone with more knowledge and/or power have recommendations on how to deal with this problem?

I'm no admin and only a minor tech-head, but the fact that it's a cloudflare response does sound like cloudflare, which NS uses for protection, has singled out your server. It's at least not impossible that this is the case, and it's thus an issue ...tangentially related to NS?

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us ... e-visitor-

From what is said there, it does sound like it's something NS needs to deal with.

[Wolfram and Hart]

Doesn't fix your problem, but you might be interested in this script that answers issues via API
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=423382&start=58

[Aibohphobia]

Doesn't fix your problem, but you might be interested in this script that answers issues via API
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=423382&start=58

Thank you. It actually might. Unless the bloody http/https "mixed active content" problem arises again. My server runs on http, and NS has forced https.
If it doesn't work from my server, I can always run it locally until my server's IP is removed from Cloudflare's blacklist or someone from NS' administration helps delisting it.
I will have to modify your script, however. I find it difficult to even look at "getElementsByTagName()" and "getAttribute()", sorry

[Aibohphobia]

[violet] seems to have unbanned my server's IP address, for which I am very grateful. I am glad to finally be able to take some matters out of my head.