This is a prequel to "Guide to Transfering Your Purchased Goods v2.0"
which is tba atm (still writing it)
My goal is to hopefully give you the knowledge and possibly open up a discussion about proxies, VPN's, user-agents, and everything in between. As we all know, JumpStart has been cracking down on hacking/ cheating. More so lately than before, well I have a few theories behind how this was done but we can discuss that another time.
Them doing so, has forced me to change my methods. -- Since they were so widely used. But another key area which I've noticed is causing problems is your actually your own doing (or the coders) just because these were not issues before.
Since I've started being more conscious about my proxies
(and user-agent in code), ban rate is at 0% and I am able to accomplish A LOT more than I was before. Which is great news since my ban rate went from 0% to wtf, why is shit always getting randomly frozen. Hopefully this makes you excited, as this information is crucial!
Lets first start with explaining proxies and VPN's on a dumb'd down scale. This shit gets real complicated and very specific, but for Neopets, the general know how will satisfy.
Proxies & VPN's
I first want to note that I AM NOT a fan of free/ public proxies. Because you have to do some rigorous scraping and testing of the proxies to ensure your getting quality. Second, if we all use free proxies, from lets say HMA's public proxy list. Then won't there be many using the same proxy to do il-legit things? (seeing that they were tested and only x amount will be high anon and useful) And what i'm trying to stress to you is that JumpStart is not fucking around anymore, these things are logged and noted and will be used against you!
Third, they aren't dedicated, and may fail unexpectedly. And when free proxies fail, rather than keeping you offline, they just don't work and your real IP is exposed. Which leads me to a story where I almost lost all of my current stock at the time due to free proxies failing and exposing my IP on various accounts. After a few days (since its free and isn't dedicated) I had exposed myself and connected my home IP to all the accounts. Wake up the next day to find myself not only IP banned from Neopets but all my stock was GONE. I had to build from square one again and re-evaluate how much I really knew.
So now that I go that out of the way, you can imagine I wont be discussing free proxies. But the process is like this, you scrape proxies from the internet, you test the proxies, and you select only the best and hope they last (some websites out there offer a service like this for a small fee, but they give you a massive proxy pool).
Just keep in mind,
it pays to.. well pay when it comes to proxies.
PROXIES
Proxies for idiots
are basically a middleman between you and the internet. You connect to a different server and then surf the internet, or whatever application you have the proxy connected to, from that server. Since we use these for bots, all of the bots handling is done through the proxy. If you use it for your web browser only your web browser will funnel through this proxy. These are great for getting things done on multiple accounts at the same time under different identities. Most of the time you have to add an extension to the specific browser to get it to work for just that browser. Otherwise most browsers direct you to the OS internet options to route the traffic through there. But keep in mind, this does not mask all of your traffic, it just happens that browser uses your computers default internet settings. (But not all applications do, thus exposing your IP, kind of irrelevant though)
There are many types of proxy protocols and ways they are setup. You have HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS proxies as the most popular. They can be setup as reverse backconnect, backconnect, reverse, transparent... you name it, they got it setup that way. This info is irrelevant unless your coding. But if you connect through sockets you'd want SOCKS proxies, so on so forth. Enough of that.
VPNS
VPN's masks your identity as well. However the key difference is a VPN masks ALL of your networks traffic. ANYTHING you do on your computer while connected to a VPN is masked. VPN is definitely the way to go if you are novice, but take this with a grain of salt, because your limited to really only one account at a time. Having to clear cache and cookies, change location and then re-login to Neopets on a new account. Basically you can't play or do things on multiple accounts (safely). If you only have one other account, or set of accounts (main and sides) then a VPN is the way to go, it will always ensure your traffic is encrypted for bots, skype, internet browsing etc.
User-Agents and OS's!
USER-AGENTS
This factor is over-looked because I don't think it was really ever a factor before. But like 95% of bots use the same user-agent. It's
Chrome, and if not updated with the latest downloadable version, the user-agent shows up as an outdated version of chrome. Then, a cluster of people are using the same version of chrome from the same OS doing the same things. It's funny stuff.
To give you an idea of what I mean, check out this
(you need an account to see links).
This url displays all the different User-Agent strings for just CHROME, albeit though some are really outdated versions but you get the gist.
There are lots of options!
So why is this important? Well, how does it make sense if you were just access a website from Firefox on a Windows. To all the sudden doing tasks on Neopets from an outdated Chrome browser on iOS/windows? Or going from Safari on a iOS to Chrome on a Windows?
You get what i'm saying here?
Not to mention the user-agent could be of an outdated model which isn't a factor necessarily, unless its really outdated.
Example of headers sent.
This is Chrome for Windows 7 OS
Code:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36
This is chrome for Mac OS
Code:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2227.1 Safari/537.36
It's different,
it's not the same. And people generally update their browsers with newest releases. More so if its been a couple years (when you get a new computer you always download the latest) So anything older than like 2014 is probably not logical, could be safe, but doesn't really make much sense.
How can I fix this?
Well if your using an open-source bot, you can change it yourself. I don't want to scare completely, IT IS likely for people to have more than one browser, and a Mac/ Windows. It's when your switching it all around repeatedly and alternating between the two that it gets suspicious, when you start throwing in more OS's and user-agents, its just one big cluster-fuck of a mess. And yes, NEOPETS TRACKS THIS. They have a function called get_browser() which does exactly that. It gets your OS, and your browser and all the good stuff.
To recap, you need to be conscious of what browsers and operating system (and version of OS) you use for each account you access and keep it consistent.
Coders, i suggest the module fake-useragent, or something similar, or come up with a simple solution.
(you need an account to see links) provides an API to get the latest for each browser and each OS. We should not overlook this.
Mix this in with Proxies and VPN's, if it doesn't add up correctly, its pretty easy to spot a bad fish when its swimming the opposite direction.
Even the option of choosing a Windows OS or Macintosh OS would be a huge difference.
Recommended Services
As for recommendations to Proxies or VPN's there are many to choose from with a variety of prices, all with a slight variation of how they do things. What you want to look for is people who have their own data-centers and are not reselling from someone else's servers. Why? For the best price obviously!
And you haven't forgot have you? It pays to pay in the proxy world!
I've done some rigorous research recently on the subject and I've come across many providers that are suitable. To explain further, there are better services out there, apart from the go to's like HSS and HMA. Each of the latter use a cloud based system. Meaning nothing is dedicated and its split evenly among the users for load balance. Hints why you get slower load times, because you could have some asshole on the other side using up all the bandwidth. Oh and... WE ALL USE HMA AND HSS X_X
The downside to most VPN services, they are cloud based, there is no steady IP for a single location (Ex. HMA LA loc1 may have 10 different IP's for that one location), and it masks your entire computers network activity instead of the single instance/ browser you are working with.
On the contrary, private proxies do not mask your entire computers network and they can be pricey if your working in bulk. That's really about it, they don't limit you to one account but will mask whatever application your working with.
PROXIES
(you need an account to see links) This service gives you the most proxys for your dollar. However, the IP's given are pretty similar in look. The locations are diverse, but it's still a little weird to me. I've used them before with no problems and were much faster than when using HMA. IP authentication available. HTTP/HTTPS protocol
(you need an account to see links)
(you need an account to see links) This place is great. They offer both semi-dedicated and dedicated proxies. The difference is the price and whom uses them. But nothing to sweat, they have their own data-centers so the speed is just as fast. Multiple subnets to choose from. IP authentication available. HTTP/HTTPS protocol
(you need an account to see links) Another great stop for private proxies. They offer both semi-dedicated and dedicated proxies. However their semi-dedicated proxies are only available in larger packages. The IP's are very diverse. A very professional service. IP authentication available. HTTP/HTTPS protocol
(you need an account to see links) These guys are top of the line. Not only do they offer dedicated IP's and have the best overall user experience. They also offer the most features, you can authenticate via user/pass, IP authentication. You can choose which protocol your proxies can handle, and the best part, you can change this whenever you want. switch from HTTP/HTTPS to SOCKS in just a click of a button! They tell you where each location is located, the IP's are 100% unique from each other. They offer a free IP change and many other services, all with a few clicks of the button.
I get a huge hard on by these guys because of how professional they are with their service. It's definitely my most recommended.
VPN
(you need an account to see links) I really like these guys for both their pricing and the options they have available. You can choose from a shared VPN service or a dedicated, private VPN service. All for a really great price! They offer multiple subnets and locations for both the shared and private VPN experience.
(you need an account to see links) They are amazing. All around amazing experience here. Not only do they offer private, shared, backconnect and everything in-between in terms of proxies, they also offer a top of the line VPN service. Their service is only private, meaning you are the only one on your VPN server. You can choose from multiple locations upon setup. Whats great about this is, the IP you receive will remain the same indefinitely until
you decide to change it. Most other services refresh and repopulate proxy lists monthly.
Disclaimer: I'm no way claiming that I am a master coder, or a master anything. But I can tell you i've been doing my research lately as I've been expanding my skills with coding and really diving into accomplishing tasks in bulk while staying completely safe since JumpStart has stepped up their game. Part of doing these task required threading and of course along with it comes proxies and VPN's. I was tired of things randomly getting frozen and I finally dived in to figure out why it was happening.
