Inquiry about Bot Accounts

[baphometric]

Hello TDF!

I happened to notice today (for the first time in over 2 years, gee I'm observant) that there is such a thing as a Bot account on TDF. See this image:

Capture.PNG (9.8 KiB) Viewed 832 times

This surprised me, given that section 9 of the code of conduct (COC) specifies:

9. Automated downloads, viruses or malicious code

No use of automated download programs (bots, web harvesters, etc). Such programs affect the performance of our server by making too many concurrent requests. No postings containing viruses or malicious code.

So I assume that one or more of these things is going on here:
1. I don't understand the COC correctly
2. These bots don't download, and instead do something else that doesn't violate the COC
3. This is a security issue / COC violation that should be reported
4. These bots are run by the forum admins, and normal users cannot create bots (this seems very likely, I just googled those bots and they are both SEO related)

Assuming that these bots are legit and allowed, then I'm actually pretty excited! I'm a software developer with experience writing bots, so I'm curious to know what I could do with that on TDF.

Can anyone give me more information about these bot accounts, what kinds of things they do, and how someone can set one up?

Apologies if this is already clearly documented, but I searched around and didn't come up with much.

Thanks!

P.s. is this forum ever looking for coding freelancers/volunteers? I have over 10 years of professional software development experience including PHP, JavaScript, and lots of other web technologies. Admins, PM me if you want to chat!

[The Doll Advocate]

Nice catch !!!

[Tsall]

Those Bots are search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, ...

Every search engine must download as much as possible from the internet to index as much as possible to make the content available to their search results.
In other words: Every site that want's to be found by Google, Bing, etc. should better allow those search engine bots. This forum software detects them and therefore shows them in the list.

Such bots do read only a few pages and then stop and come back later. They do not download much and therefore do not harm the site.

They are visible in the list for long time because it takes an hour till they vanish after the last access.


I think that makes clear that those bots do not fall under rule 9.

[baphometric]

I think that makes clear that those bots do not fall under rule 9.

Thank you Tsall!

Would it be correct to understand that end users who create bots that do not download, and respect the rate limits of the site, would be allowed?

For example, could I create a bot account that uses AI to simulate my doll and have her respond to users automatically?

This could be accomplished using a web crawler such as Puppeteer or Selenium to automate logging in, navigating, and posting
Or possibly could be automated using a public API, if our forum provides such an interface.

Just curious, trying to feel out what would be acceptable here, I don't want to step on any toes, but I think I have some fun ideas and just enough knowledge to pull it off

[Tsall]

I wish this forum software had an API, sadly there isn't any.

For the rest of your questions I inform management as it is no longer a technical question.

[Nescio50]

Sorry for my belated response. Tsall already answered about current bots at TDF, they are all by search engines doing their indexing.

About your last question, members at TDF have to be humans. Members can have doll accounts for role play with their dolls. Still, all posts should be by humans.
If the content is AI generated, if done well we even don't know But what we don't want is automated bots doing postings at TDF without any human involvement. To put it simple, a human has to click submit.