The Anti-@stimialiti Pro-Active and Reactive Counter Tool
This post is a long time coming. For weeks now I have been writing and honing an anti-parasite script designed to piss off a certain person who has been gnawing at certain selected people's rewards for years now.
Did you hear right.., yes I said YEARS.
Many have come and gone, @dein-problem used to down-vote nearly all posts by 0.001C for several months before giving up.
It happens often and you need to ignore it. One dickhead down-votes your content for a very small amount, gets bored only to be replaced by the next.
If they get no feedback, they give up…
That is except for one certain bloke who lives in the Middle East named @stimialiti who never gives up, and has been constantly down-voting my comments and posts since late 2018.
He can't be reasoned with, can't be communicated with, and takes the food from my child's mouth repeatedly. If you are thinking 'The Terminator' then you are way off track.
This all stemmed from my being part of an Anti-Abuse group that @steevc invited me to be a part of in mid-2018. These were the STEEM days, and bid-bots were then part of the system.
None of us were particular fans of paying for votes but they were tolerated.
@stimialiti (@atempt), took it a little further and decided to pay for votes for his comments to some unscrupulous BOT owners which we felt was going too far.
After a lot of comments and flagging (now called down-voting), @stimialiti stopped paying for votes for his comments which in turn installed some kind of everlasting hatred for a sub-section of the then Anti-Abuse crew.
From that time onwards he saw it as his life mission to deny us of 1c-4c per comment, posts, while staunchly refusing to buy this poisonous STEEM token.
He relishes the fact that he can send my comment votes under the dust threshold, waits for the @dustbunny vote, and then clicks downvote while wanking with his right hand making a right old mess.
...Big fucking deal you might say, and you would be right'...
As @steevc has repeatedly mentioned to me, it is irrelevant and @stimialiti should be ignored.
I would ignore it but for the fact that it has now been going on for over 3 years. @stimialiti is not a dimwit but is one of these people who holds grudges and can't move on.
Imagine if that tenacity was put to good use somewhere else. I know he manually does all this as he’s inconsistent.
@stimialiti has three other accounts, namely @atempt, @fersher, and @slowgrow.
A year ago or so, he made the mistake of commenting with the @slowgrow account which was summarily zeroed in reputation to (0) by us beleaguered and tormented souls who are in a constant state of depression.
So there’s the history lesson, and now you need to know why I am bothering to write all this bullshit you are reading.
I don’t hold grudges against people who abuse on HIVE (then STEEM). In fact many of them, I have turned around and now support. It’s easy to do the wrong thing and have a bundle of down-votes sent to your post.
This guy is different and if he ever comments using ANY of those above accounts, then it will be negative reputation time (as if it matters).
I know I speak for several of us, namely @steevc, @revisesociology, @enforcer48, and @themarkymark who constantly get gnat bitten by Mr. Dickhead.
In the past, there have been several scripts written to counter @stimialiti, one by @mathowl and another by @sabion that I am aware of.
I felt something different was needed as @saboin mentioned that @stimialiti will try his best to ‘fuck up your bot and figure out ways around it’.
I do love a challenge and @stimialiti has been trying all ways to send mine and other comments under the dust threshold thus earning a big fat $0.00 using lots of tactics in the last few weeks.
A human after all is always better than artificial intelligence, though my reactive part of the script has gone through several reiterations to combat his tricks.
It reminds me of a game of cat and mouse, without any stakes other than losing 4c here or there.
I need to give a big shoutout to @foxon and @steevc who gave me the base script to work on. Far from being an orthodox programmer, I can get by reasonably well and am fluent in VB-Script, PowerShell, KIX and .NET Forms, and Console coding.
I did struggle with the strangeness of Python to begin with and @holger80’s documentation of his BEEM API library but it’s all coming together quite nicely now.
Without disclosing my full script (I can't play into the enemy's hands), I will show parts of it and the feedback I receive when running it.
It contains a pro-active element that votes comments from accounts included in the [victims] array and uses the accounts in [voters].
This means that before the comments descend to day 6 which is when @stimialiti gets all excited they have already been voted, and due to his dismal VP, he can no longer send them into the abyss of dust.
I am quite aware that @stimialiti will be reading all this and that previous counter-measures were always reactive.
The reactive part of the script still exists and runs as I personally love the ideas that @stimialiti comes up with to try and counter me.
You see, all this has taught me a new language. I didn't know Python whatsoever before embarking on this counter script. That was the whole purpose of it, not to save me a few pennies.
It does give one a certain morale boost knowing you have created something unique. My code is not pretty and is inelegant compared to @foxon’s Def routines.
In time I will be able to code like that, but only if @stimialiti continues to try and out-fox my script
(which would be great).
I didn’t mean this post to be so long, so to put everything in a nutshell, I wrote the ‘The Anti-@stimialiti Pro-Active and Reactive Counter Tool’ to:
- Learn Python
- Irritate @stimialiti
- Give me a reason to tell you all, probably giving me combined rewards that he has deprived me of since late 2018.
…and I know some of the old SFR Anti-Abuse crew will get a kick out of this.
Part of the post rewards will be going to @foxon and @steevc. Thanks so much guys for the initial help.
- Earn currency while you play brewing virtual beer with CryptoBrewMaster
- Earn currency while you play and become a global Rock Star with Rising Star
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, rehive, engage me or all of these things.
You be doing God’s work.
Also, he might need to update his profile. I’ve been labelled as “worse than Bernie” by some.
I should say that Bernie is back, you should have a look. Stim may be reduced to a zombie by now, mostly flagging your stuff and voting up @joanstewart's regardless of what it consists of. You are truly privileged Joan!
He’s probably trying to catch people changing their vote weight for extra curation. Lol
We have seen it in the past with him, every half cent counts..., jeez.
Happy 2022 to you too @slobberchops as for Bernie, Anddumbfuck his Trolls, all tend to roll like shit downhill.
Privilege is all mine to welcome you, make 2022 a better place for me and for you. SQL I tried in 2005 lost my cool not having time to penetrate the noggin so congrats on the coding it really helps.
!LUV
!BEER
@joanstewart(4/10) gave you LUV.
SQL is a funny language, I know it to some extent and use @arcange's HIVE-SQL to find abusers sometimes. I am not so conversant with it and have some butchered scripts I got from @abh12345 who knows it much better than me.
I used to use it in SCCM (work stuff), for queries in AD. You probably don't know what I am talking about.
No clue what you on about, you right!
SQL didn't sink in... not then, definitely not now.
Will rely on people in know how to keep flow running smooth by supporting.
Your content has been voted as a part of Encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
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Lol. It truly is an awesome thing. You get to learn python into the bargain. You are right in that it really is like having a dedicated tester to push at the edge cases of your scripting. Makes you and the script become so much better!
@saboin tells me he also learnt Python by coding his version of it. I am not the first one hehe...
It's like a learning academy! :0D
Was learning Python hard? I have been wanting to learn a new language, but I feel like I have forgotten so many of the basics by now that it would be difficult. Nice job putting this together. I hope it works out for you!
As always you need a project to work on and this was mine. I don't find switching languages hard and am quite in tune with them as there are always tons of examples on the internet.
In this case, I had to work with @holger80's documentation which was quite painful at times. You have to keep trying things until it works. I had a lot of problems when I started and it took a while for anything to work.
The spacing thing is weird. Python will stop with an error if you code is incorrectly spaced. Never seen that before.
That does seem kind of weird. I always missed commas in different places. That or colons and semicolons. It was a pain.
I am used to For...Next. In the case of Python there is no 'Next' so you have to space it correctly.. below is a snippet..
The next 'if' statement need to line up and be spaced, not tabbed. It was frustrating to start with.
After trying to teach many a person VBS in the past, I feel like you either have the coding gene or you don't.. and if you don't you will never be able to write things from nothing.. just edit existing scripts.
That is probably the camp that I fall into. That last part. :P
Many code editing software will convert tabs to spaces automatically when editing Python. I use VS Code, and it does that, so I don't get the message about mixing spaces and tabs. I did get that error message when I was using the IDLE program that comes with Python when you install it.
I'm using some ancient editor from 2007, and that isn't helping much. It's better than notepad!
Python is one of the easiest and most useful languages.
I haven't coded since college twenty years ago and it was C++. Plus I was horrible at it, so I don't have much hope. I just don't think like a coder I don't think.
Programming is largely solving problems in efficient and succinct ways.
Yeah, I guess I was just destined to work on the hardware side of things more than the software side...
Before I started learning Python, the only programming I did was in BASIC back in the late 80s to mid 90s as a kid.
Python is a lot easier to learn than C++. It's one of the easiest languages to learn. If I'm not mistaken, it was first developed to teach programming, then they realized it could be useful for actual production software. It's one of the most popular languages and it's intuitive because it's almost like reading English. Someone described it as pseudo-code that actually runs.😄
Very interesting. My issue is I don't really know as though I have anything I need codded. That's where my real disconnect is.
That's right. You need a project to make it worth the effort.
I see that you, too, made an AppleII/e fart.
So really @stimialiti has done you a favour by encouraging you to learn some Python :) beem is pretty good once you figure it out. I use it for a few scripts and it was fun helping out with yours.
You know I don't care about the few cents he can remove, but it's worth it to piss him off. He could have done well on Hive, but he chose to be a dickhead. I guess he could have another account we don't know about, but we'd spot any transfers to the old ones.
I've always said that Hive is the wild west and renegades are part of that. Need vigilante scripts to deal with them.
Hive five!
!PIZZA
I found BEEM hard work to start with. There are no examples dotted about on the internet, and GitHub's resource code repo is not in tune with what I was trying to do. Thanks for getting me started, I know you remember me getting quite frustrated with it to begin with.
I didn't mind helping out. I learnt something too. With these things it's largely a matter of knowing where to look stuff up. We need a wider selection of code examples to be available. I know you don't want to expose all your tricks with this though.
I don't feel he's a coder but he's certainly no dummy. I can tell by his diction.
Obviously fairly cunning to have done what he did, but this is way over the top as a reaction to our countermeasures. He just can't move on.
I hope not, I have enjoyed this project.
The way I learned to code stuff for Hive at the beginning was by reading code from Holger's GitHub repo. His code for steemrewarding.com is all on there, so I looked through it for examples. I also looked at code from others. For example, my @caturday.curator bot is based on emre's tagbot and the algorithm I use for evaluating posts is inspired by actifit's bot.
That's a good point. It will use the the same kind of calls, thanks.
Is amazing how you play with python language I really love python. I would love to advance on my programming knowledge.
I found it hard going, only because I was using an API that wasn't so well documented by examples, and the developer has gone AWOL.
For a while I was wondering why I’d get small votes from wanker in quick secession.
I remember first downvoting Stimiliti wiping out all votes on his comments. He cried bloody murder. He literally would use 9 or so bid bots to upvote all his comments that looked written by a four year old.
It became his mission to get revenge. He frequently messages anyone in conflict with enforcer, me, and a few others tips on how to impact is the most and disapproving messages when they do something he doesn’t approve of.
He has yet to give up despite having almost no stake.
For a bit he had a little moment of glory when coininstant delegated to his accounts.
His commitment is impression, he must work at Walmart or something.
I put him on mute a long time ago on chain and via Gina/Friday and stopped even knowing he exists.
Projects like these are great learning experiences.
It was a nostalgia trip going back to Steemit and dragging those comments out. I was barely a member of SFR when he turned up with those shitty propaganda posts of several sentences and no images.
I remember the bid-bot comment votes and had never seen anything like it before. 7 or 8 of them on a single post, and they kept coming.
Muting him is one idea but I always liked to see what he was doing. One comment on any of his accounts and it's bye-bye account. He could always comment here if he doesn't give a crap about his reputation status.
All those things you mention I also remember. Expect the votes to keep coming so long as he keeps being my free tester!
If you want some fun, look through his transfer history.
Here's a taste:
I have seen a few of these during the past years. @enforcer48 has pointed them out on a few occasions. Funny that nobody seems to take any notice 😀
oh checking out transfers is quite the hoot.
Check out this one from @lasseehlers
I liked @nathanpieters’ response the best.
Kneel, peasant.
This sort of persistence when he's making bugger all seems a little manic. I see he's been active 'over there', but he wouldn't even see if I commented :)
Some people just won't accept when they are in the wrong.
Best thing developed on Hive in 2021!
And it just goes on going better!
He doesn't give you so much shit these days, you are deemed as only a minor perpetrator!
I must say I don't notice him so much! Maybe I don't get that many comment votes.
I remember those downvotes. I don't seem to be targeted anymore. Still, if I can delegate some HP somewhere just to help slap down his BS, just say the word.
Thanks, that's generous of you.. but I think I have him covered. He won't ever buy any HIVE and makes bugger all due to this behaviour. It could have been so different if he trod a different path years ago.
I see we have a similar sense of humour in our programming style:
My script streamed the blocks. It was part of another bot that I was using to counter the SBI downvoter at the time. Since it was already streaming the blockchain for those downvotes, I just tacked on a little extra bit of code to mess with @stimialiti and his bunch of alts.
At first I was just countering everything he did, but then he started downvoting abuser just to make my bot upvote them, then he'd remove his donwvote later once my bot had upvoted. It's at that point that I realized I needed to use a whitelist so it would only counter his downvotes on certain users (who were mostly members of SFR and other anti-abuse groups). I can send you that list if you're interested to know who made the cut.
Later, he started to downvote posts with 1% to make my bot waste downvote mana. I then set a threshold so it wouldn't counter his votes unless they were a certain percentage. It didn't take him long to figure that one out either.
You're right when you say he's not a dimwit. He was very good at tricking my bots, but it forced me to change strategies when he did figure out my algorithms.
Overall it was just me having fun with programming. I was just starting to learn Python at the time. I'm sure he got a kick out of it, too.
If only he could actually give his opinion, but he's scared to :)
Haha.. I remember those accounts very well. Hook up with me on discord, I would love to see your code. Mine is pretty much done now but the writing style is terrible.. and I know it!
My code at the time was sloppy as well. It's much better now.
Spite driven development and I love it 😍
It's an excuse to start a project, I can't learn a language without some kind of goal. He made it possible.
Friend I invite you to visit my blog and help me with a good vote, greetings from Venezuela
Er... no.
She only writes me in Spanish. I am grateful. I don't understand begging in Spanish.
Astalavista Baby!
Ironically, I never would have joined SFR if stimi hadn't shamed me into it.
It was him that convinced me that flagging was indeed a necessity.
I had a look back yesterday at what he did, it was truly appalling. There was some bad stuff then, but his took the biscuit.
Can you do a script that gets the big insider whales who downvote non approved content, rips their nuts off, and stuffs them down their throats?
That would require me to install the MOOD API, that looks into their brains for fluctuations. Let me see if I can find it.
Cool little python project.
I think I should play a bit more with python again in 2022:)
I am going to further develop the script, only to give me more insight into BEEM and it's working.
Dear @slobberchops,
Your support for our previous proposal has been much appreciated but it expired end of December!
Do you mind renewing your vote to our proposal for 2022 so our team can continue its work!
You can do it on Peakd, ecency, Hive.blog or using HiveSigner.
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/199
We wish you a Happy New Year!
Having coders here to look after our back is a great reason to be on Hive!
Coders Thank You Go Well In 2022. Some I know, some I don't so this has been informative and interesting, almost as good as if not better than Urban Explorer weeding out!
I don't want to be seen as one-dimensional! I know.. almost that.
Horse still has two eyes even with blinkers on, never one-dimensional when deep diving.
Very interesting that there is a python library for the API I assumed it would have been some sort of functional language such as haskell, will have to have a look at it myself :)
I don't know about others but I had to read this twice to understand the message. It is a great piece actually, learning python is great
You can revive my pun-bot if you want another coding challenge :3
Downvotes as a weapon? No, surely not? 😉
I thought our mutual friend @steevc said one can't lose any rewards because they're not paid out yet? 🤣
Isn't it a sad day when folk have to write an anti-downvote script. #LeSigh
I doubt I ever said that. I may have said rewards are not final until payout. They can go up or down before that.
Downvotes are the decentralised way to deal with abuse, but people will abuse them to be nasty. Just part of the freedom of Hive. Mr Chops is enjoying the challenge of cancelling the minor effects of this aggrieved abuser. He's getting to learn some Python. The beem library is pretty comprehensive if you want to automate anything.
You do seem to sigh a lot. I hope it's not too wearying :)
It's a
signsigh of the times. 🤣https://twitter.com/dick_turpin/status/1478748996441194499
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I also like Python. I started learning php at first but now i am in python. Its easy to learn and interesting. Good luck.
Sometimes when I read this kind of stuff, I think that some people need a real hobby or something.
I looked into Python too and would like to learn it, but had no time so far.
!PIZZA for you
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Any idea whether sunsetjesus is another sock or someone entirely different?
I think it's someone else.