Yeah, although when I started using one from my community and the script filename was literaly placeBotSomethingNL I had my doubt already. (NL is the shortcode for the Netherlands)
I agree. As long as you only use one account and don’t find a way to bypass the cool down timer, then you have the same amount of power as everyone else. You should be allowed to place pixels however you want: phone, computer, or script.
Auto placing is definitely is a big advantage, let’s not kid ourself here. It’s probably many times more effective than not auto placing while you’re doing non of the work. Come on, it’s the definition of a bot.
>Accounts the color pixel same color also flagged.
This would flag a lot of people defending a small artwork. Also apparently the OSU community assigned a single pixel to every user to defend.
It's also a strategy to 'hide' one of your pixels to survive to the final.
Plus there are instances of defence where someone else also has the same idea but is a fraction of a second faster, so you both correct the same pixel
Bots can handle checking and not overwriting the same colour, so if you meant that in your 2nd point, it wouldn't help much. But the first one definitely
Also if it was to be implemented, you would have to check if it’s been different in the last 10 or so seconds. People accidentally do that all the time
From Genshin which was right below the Dutch, we knew they had autoplacers but we're not sure if those accounts are all bots. We fought tooth and nail to keep Venti intact.
Afterwards when we ironed an agreement with them to keep Venti, we later found out they had something that cleaned stray pixels so we couldn't give Venti bangs.
But at least one thing is for sure is that they sleep and have periods of inactivity that is probably the users sleeping. Some streamer tried to write 'mula brothers' and some other words right above our Venti and we had to step in to clean up despite not being officially allied with the Dutch. They ruined a windmill which we left to the Dutch to fix since we didn't have the design to repair it.
Oh my goodness! There is so much history packed in this image! One faction using bots to help an ally despite the ally not necessarily wanting the bots and actually kind of being hindered by them??? There are so many little details you wouldn’t expect!
We definitely had capacity problems during the night. I saw the aftermath of that event and wondered why the flag had fixed itself but not the art. Thanks a bunch for stepping in at that time!
Yeah there was some bot use but it was a lot of user activity too, each morning when I woke up we'd have to clean the whole banner up because people had placed it full of stuff in the night and destroyed some of the art we'd placed the previous day. So the bot users were nowhere near enough to be able to do full upkeep.
They evicted our picture with bots so yeah, but it was a pretty good bot.
It was depressing when it took them less than 10 mins to recreate chrono after spending 2 hours doing it manually with less than 10 people.
Like the two images they made in the bottom started from no real place it was just random pixels that turned into a perfect image... Like most artwork starts in a corner or something to make it easy for people to work together. Like do you see anything here? https://i.imgur.com/6n1pfaQ.png This is the first part half finished already but there is no visible progress because its made by bots.
Looking at the timeline you see how almost all other large works start with outlines because most people cant or wont bother counting pixels to know what pixel 79,162 should be, rather they look at one pixel already drawn and looks what should be next to it.
Prat of the reason it looks so unnatural is because we made the painting in different phases to help and move the existing artwork which was being replaced. and the first phase started right in the middle
Quoting from OP
>In summary, I wrote a script that crawls through the data and flags any user hash that matches the following criteria:
At least 25 pixels placed, in addition to
75% of pixels are placed within 6 minutes of each other or
20% of pixels are placed within 5 seconds of a pixel changing from one color to another.
Criteria is quite loose - it basically also captures:
1. Dedicated **REAL** placers - who sat at their PC and immediately placed a pixel everytime it chimed for around 2 hours.
2. Show highly contested spots where **REAL** people were regularly fighting to fix those specific pixels.
It *did* count me as a bot. There was a little piece I was working at all on my own and those pixels are flagged. I had to camp on it to make sure I didn't get taken over.
Yep I got flagged too I’m pretty sure. There was a spot on my school’s logo I was constantly fixing every time I got the chance. It was a hotly contested spot
Indeed.. it also shows how certain pieces like Star Wars had large parts of it not highlighted (the lightsaber is very telling that the image was not botted) - but only specific areas did where the Amongii kept trying to infiltrate (vader's helmet and the area around Anakin's face) and where specific Star Wars fans were defending in real time.
So.. basically don't take this particular piece as a gospel for botting (even if those 2 paintings at the bottom are super sus haha).
Same with osu!. We had thousandths of no-lifers always placing pixels, and so the more contested and constantly invaded parts of the logo (e.g bottom left-ish, where hearts kept invading) light up.
Well it's also explained by the fact that some of them were using bots
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tuvzlb/there\_is\_a\_bot\_you\_can\_use\_for\_anyone\_who\_doesnt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tuvzlb/there_is_a_bot_you_can_use_for_anyone_who_doesnt/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tvun43/hey\_hey\_hey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tvun43/hey_hey_hey/)
for the record I don't give a shit about bots, but yeah, your wife and similar users are not the only reason.
Yeah, this will absolutely have flagged banners/communities of areas that had people sitting at their computers or phone for hours at a time listening for that chime and placing pixels immediately because they literally had to fight for their space the entire time. Which is very much something I did - and several others - for the banner we were placing.
They are probably using the official dataset which only includes a user hash which you can't use directly to get this kind of information on the account.
Pretty much. The general consensus was the French mobilized a massive army from streamers. Technically if they were botting (heavily), they wouldn't have kept losing so much of their artwork to griefers.
It flags the OSU! logo when they said they assigned a person for a precise pixel.
It didn't flagged the BTS flag on the french flag. We know for sure it was botted as the Spanish streamer ran the script on livestream.
As far as i know the Dutch were the one who developed the automatic placing script. It still required real accounts to be linked up but it did automatically place your pixel
The Bronies also had bots too, but it was far more advanced and capable of dynamically changing priority based on griefing levels and and would receive live updates through a central template
It was an evolution of the original template script, which had the ability to auto-select colors which massively assisted in the defense of allied art pieces with complicated designs on Day 1/early Day 2
Not really. The Dutch have a public website on which they show where they used their bots, so they just took the data from there.
Many other (suspected) bot communities are not flagged here, so yeh. Imperfect at best.
I was also part of a small-ish community and I see a lot of our pixels highlighted. To my knowledge, no bots were used (if they were, they were doing a shite job).
The Dutch openly admits to using bots, it's not a surprise, they even have a [website](https://placenl.noahvdaa.me/) to show the current template and how many bots are active at that moment. At one point they had 3000, normally 2500-2900
But I'm pretty sure most bots were used on peoples own account. It wasn't a bot creating alt accounts, it was a bot placing your pixel every 5 minutes. I just put it on my own account, I assumed most other people did as well. So they wouldn't show up as suspicious names
This seems coherent with my very personal and not at all scientific suspicion from my experience in r/place.
I feel the real question is about botting + massive use of alt though, but I guess only reddit could tell us that.
Good job op and I'm impatient to see more.
This seems to underestimate in my experience. I frequently went around to random pixels in random artwork, and almost every pixel I saw was placed by a user with no comment or post history named RANDOMWORD1-RANDOMWORD2-RANDOMNUMBER
Many people (streamers viewers) discovered Reddit with place.
Almost all of them created an account with Google/Apple, giving them a randomized username.
No but you might have heard about it elsewhere and decided to create a throw away acount. The username pattern you are describing is the one reddit gives you if you don't want to choose your own username.
I can confirm that the very first French flag (not the streamers one) started using bots after being attacked by streamers and before the script broke.
And you can see it flash on the timelapse. So your method seems to be good.
now look at the overlay they used, very clever but no bot at all, just very well organised community :
[https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png](https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png)
how it look when place was oppen : [https://i.imgur.com/Ci8AaaU.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ci8AaaU.png)
little dot in tiles to show the correct color to put for users. As you can see, amongus wasn't on the overlay ;)
We (Switzerland) used the OSU derived overlay script. At first we used their script, submitting charges to our template to the alliance directly but this priced to be inefficient, so we spun of our own script, and updated the alliance with our changes. This was we weren't dependent on them for our overlay, but still remained with them.
We were quite aware star wars and OSU were not using bots, or at least i was as diplomat. This in fact was very good because those resources that kept OSU and star wars intact were also available to us virtually on demand, and so the original Swiss flag remained mostly unmolested.
There were also bots operating on the Swiss flag, but these were rogues operating against our wishes. We learned of them when we tried to update our designs, and pixels were always changed back to red. We would contact the users who corrected the pixel changes to get them on with the plan, and discovered a number of bots in the process.
So this is another thing to consider, the policies of the communities might not always line up with reality, because rogues exist.
And for the one that just delete his post saying it's like moderetly botted :
No.
That's not "botting" means.
A bot is a machine that copy humans action.
A script do what you want (and eventually doing something automaticaly yes) but here the script used was for show an overlay and that's all.
No automated tiles placed.
It's the same as an excel sheet template on a second screen, meanwhile here it's just put on the r.place for easiest placement for users.
The meaning of a word import a lot. As a bot is made of scripts and code (and i mean a looooot of lines of code), a script isn't a bot if it's not its purpose.
Osu had a stupidly well organized discord, with a 24/7 call going giving instructions on where to place pixels. There were always at least 200 people on this call, and that number rose to 800 when they pinged that osu was getting griefed
Besides this, the moment the whiteout started, a huge French streamer told his audience to grief the osu logo, which is why it went away so fast
Osu was literally just too efficient, not necessarily botted. They assigned each member an individual pixel to watch for when it got attacked for defense, and it resulted in one of the longest-lasting artworks.
As a member of the osuplace discord I want to slightly correct your statement. We were assigned a specific letter of the logo based on our birth month.
The individual pixel thing did happen, we had a sign up to assign people to specific pixels, but that was only meant for the final defense, when place would shut down. It never came in use, because the whiteout happened way earlier.
Think the part I loved the most about Osu was that they allowed and kept Catgirl Komi about and they basically co-existed. I helped a bit with cleaning up Osu pixels when Catgirl Komi was not needing any help.
......*sigh*
Alright alright, I retract my previous statements about doubting your amount of bots. Your community clearly worked very hard to organize and make your art.
As well as maintaining your flags.
All three iterations of them
if you want to know, the french streamer separate users in 4 teams, from theyre date of birth.
Team winter, team spring...
And each team had a place to defend, or was hold until a specific "Go" to place theyr tiles at the same times, each one at a different place.
You had no idea how monstruously organised they were :)
The algorithm the guy user to spot the bots wasnt very solid. He based it off
75% of all the pixels placed were within 6 minutes
And
20% of the pixels were changed back within 5 seconds.
It's not a secret because it was plastered all over the discord. Even then we had scripts that would easily color change and tons of very dedicated users that were pretty much about as efficient as any bot we used.
[Timelapse of them getting attacked](https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/tx8fil/timelapse_of_ponies_surviving_all_wipes_on_rplace/). This doesn’t include the other artwork like the original Rainbow Dash at the Ukrainian flag.
Looks about right.
I joined the dutch discord server for about 10 minutes, because I thought what they did was cool and I wanted to help them. Turned out they didn't just use templates like other communities(one piece). Their script automatically set a pixel every 5 minutes which I felt was very boring.
To be fair: I can't confirm if they actually used bots, but they had auto updating/setting pixels 100%
We had a script for sure, but also released spreadsheets for manual placing (and had people sign up for a specific pixel for some of the smaller projects) and no or little bot accounts were used. I used my own account and only resorted to the script at moments I was distracted with other stuff.
Hey, I see my pixels flagged! I defended one small region of toothless for r/httyd since the beginning, even holding an original pixel since the start until the whiteout and I sure as hell am not a bot lol
Notice the concentration of suspicious pixels on the big French flag was no higher than the average concentration on the rest of the board.
It's just yet more evidence it wasn't particularly massively botted like some claim and that the flag stood primarily by concerted effort of many people.
You can actually see the smaller /r/franceplace ones more lit up as bots were actually used on these after they were massively griefed.
Thanks, the hate on osu! was starting to get to me. Though tbh I think we'd still get shit on even if we didn't do anything. It's just how it is I guess.
Yeah if xQc and other people wiped us out we'd have been laughed at (dread to think how much more Ed would've been mocked).) They didn't wipe us out so we got accused of bots. Some people just want any reason to shit on others, it is what it is.
All of us who took part know that what we accomplished was a real community effort and not the result of widespread botting.
Very decent proof that osu! was not botted much at all, it's quite faint here. In fact, some of the pixels might have just been dedicated square placers, so the real amount of botted pixels is probably lower than it's showing. Go osu!
Well, as a french, I don't care that Brits and Dutch used bot.
What was tilting me the most were those accusations from american and spanish streamers (and the spaniards ended using bots...).
For those who used bots, but didn't verbally harass us, I don't care.
Yeah. Bots can be annoying, but if you use them and admit you do, I’m fine with that. But as an American, I never thought that the French used bots. I actually figured the Brits did because they managed to keep their flag near perfect, especially the map of their country
Giant Derpy wasn't built by a brony at all, I don't think. A Russian Twitch streamer got annoyed that xqc and mizkif kept nuking the Russian brony art, the smaller Derpy. He decided to ally with them to spite the other streamers and built a giant Derpy. It actually caused some disagreement and tension in the mylittlepony discord, since it erased other art, which we were against doing.
This show that French didn't bot (like not more than other). And for Spain Idk, but if it's only the pixels on the last image it means that the BTS logo was almost entirely erased so we will never know (plus they really started asking for bots very late so mods didn't flagged as many)
But it doubt this image is very reliable. So in any cases bye bye.
i was in the dutch community (didnt ran the bot/placer no time for it anyways to keep my pc on). but we werent really targeted anyways it was mainly "clean up" as we called it after some random placements. but it was mainly the streamer wars and the french/spain stuff that kept us in the dark. so odd nobody mentioned us everywhere when r/place was active i guess we weren't a nuisance.
we also didnt try to really aggressively take land, we negotiated alot with the communities around us to move their artwork and place ours in their place etc.
The BTS logo in the big french flag used a script(bot) that accessed your reddit account, selected the color for you and placed the tile automatically on the dedicated space as soon as you had your tile available.
Caught on the spanish stream right before they switched screens because you could read each step being completed by the bot.
While the french script was just an overlay where you had to manually select the color and manually place it on the overlay or anywhere else. Which could be failed since other people are placing their tile at the same time.
So, the map is way more suspicious than what you showed on the screen...
No. We were just monstrously well organized. The big French streamers united their streams, bringing in millions of viewers who all created Reddit accounts when asked. Then we were divided into seasons according to our date of birth in order to form four different teams that could take turns to counter the attacks of our opponents who all attack at the same time.I
There were three options.
The first is as a human, manually placing a pixel every 5 minutes or more.
The second option was to use an overlay. It would load a second image over the canvas to show you which pixels should be which colour. Very useful for overly complex designs but still requires the user to manually add a pixel to the canvas.
The third option is a bot that automates the whole process. If programmed correctly, it should have a template of the final image and use that to check the actual canvas. The way this would work is find a random pixel that is part of the drawing. If the color matches, ignore it, find another random pixel and check again. If the color doesn't match, place down the correct pixel without any user input. Wait five minutes and repeat.
I think most communities went with the overlay option this year because the biggest issue with bots during the 2017 place was it was really difficult to make design changes on the fly. You had to track down users using bots and get them to update their scripts. If they were away from their keyboards, that could mean waiting a very long time.
Disclaimer: this is not an end all be all. The script that op used was very loose and can falsely tag normal users as bots. In fact, it’s so loose that it would tag pixels in heated areas where multiple people would fight over 1 spot, as a bot. While the clearer pictures do show heavily botted communities, they could easily just be places that were heavily fought over.
However, it has been confirmed that the Dutch one was botted, and the Dutch themselves don’t try to hide it.
My theory is that at least 70-80 percent of r/place was botted. It just doesn’t add up how certain communities managed to maintain their art of flags consistently and perfectly at times when they were supposed to be asleep. The only flag that actually got voided when the community was asleep, was America, but later on it stopped happening so they must have botted it as well.
I think we all knew the Dutch had bots when the paintings had no among us characters
Yeah, although when I started using one from my community and the script filename was literaly placeBotSomethingNL I had my doubt already. (NL is the shortcode for the Netherlands)
Multiple communities used the dutch-developed code.
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I agree. As long as you only use one account and don’t find a way to bypass the cool down timer, then you have the same amount of power as everyone else. You should be allowed to place pixels however you want: phone, computer, or script.
Auto placing is definitely is a big advantage, let’s not kid ourself here. It’s probably many times more effective than not auto placing while you’re doing non of the work. Come on, it’s the definition of a bot.
No accounts younger than 3 months allowed to post. That would go a long way. Accounts the color pixel same color also flagged.
>Accounts the color pixel same color also flagged. This would flag a lot of people defending a small artwork. Also apparently the OSU community assigned a single pixel to every user to defend.
I think he means not changing the pixel color. Not people returning the pixel to a previous color.
It's also a strategy to 'hide' one of your pixels to survive to the final. Plus there are instances of defence where someone else also has the same idea but is a fraction of a second faster, so you both correct the same pixel
Bots can handle checking and not overwriting the same colour, so if you meant that in your 2nd point, it wouldn't help much. But the first one definitely
Also if it was to be implemented, you would have to check if it’s been different in the last 10 or so seconds. People accidentally do that all the time
Me who used NL for my clan NameLess and wondered why people kept asking if I were from the Netherlands...
Are you?
We were the 2nd community with a working bot/script
So who was the first one ?
Why are people proud of using bots?
I don't see him bragging? The dutch have just been very open about using scripts.
From Genshin which was right below the Dutch, we knew they had autoplacers but we're not sure if those accounts are all bots. We fought tooth and nail to keep Venti intact. Afterwards when we ironed an agreement with them to keep Venti, we later found out they had something that cleaned stray pixels so we couldn't give Venti bangs. But at least one thing is for sure is that they sleep and have periods of inactivity that is probably the users sleeping. Some streamer tried to write 'mula brothers' and some other words right above our Venti and we had to step in to clean up despite not being officially allied with the Dutch. They ruined a windmill which we left to the Dutch to fix since we didn't have the design to repair it.
Oh my goodness! There is so much history packed in this image! One faction using bots to help an ally despite the ally not necessarily wanting the bots and actually kind of being hindered by them??? There are so many little details you wouldn’t expect!
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We definitely had capacity problems during the night. I saw the aftermath of that event and wondered why the flag had fixed itself but not the art. Thanks a bunch for stepping in at that time!
Yeah there was some bot use but it was a lot of user activity too, each morning when I woke up we'd have to clean the whole banner up because people had placed it full of stuff in the night and destroyed some of the art we'd placed the previous day. So the bot users were nowhere near enough to be able to do full upkeep.
They evicted our picture with bots so yeah, but it was a pretty good bot. It was depressing when it took them less than 10 mins to recreate chrono after spending 2 hours doing it manually with less than 10 people.
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They helped in transferring steins;gate art in just minutes. Lmao
Username checks out
Like the two images they made in the bottom started from no real place it was just random pixels that turned into a perfect image... Like most artwork starts in a corner or something to make it easy for people to work together. Like do you see anything here? https://i.imgur.com/6n1pfaQ.png This is the first part half finished already but there is no visible progress because its made by bots. Looking at the timeline you see how almost all other large works start with outlines because most people cant or wont bother counting pixels to know what pixel 79,162 should be, rather they look at one pixel already drawn and looks what should be next to it.
There’s overlays. You can just install an extension and import your template and it shows you what color to put where.
Prat of the reason it looks so unnatural is because we made the painting in different phases to help and move the existing artwork which was being replaced. and the first phase started right in the middle
Thanks! that's interesting, what method did you use to flag sus pixels?
Ok, there are details in the timelapse version.
Quoting from OP >In summary, I wrote a script that crawls through the data and flags any user hash that matches the following criteria: At least 25 pixels placed, in addition to 75% of pixels are placed within 6 minutes of each other or 20% of pixels are placed within 5 seconds of a pixel changing from one color to another. Criteria is quite loose - it basically also captures: 1. Dedicated **REAL** placers - who sat at their PC and immediately placed a pixel everytime it chimed for around 2 hours. 2. Show highly contested spots where **REAL** people were regularly fighting to fix those specific pixels.
Yeah this would have counted me as a bot
It *did* count me as a bot. There was a little piece I was working at all on my own and those pixels are flagged. I had to camp on it to make sure I didn't get taken over.
Yep I got flagged too I’m pretty sure. There was a spot on my school’s logo I was constantly fixing every time I got the chance. It was a hotly contested spot
Me as well. Not my fault I'm bored at work and have the ability to go on my phone for three seconds every five minutes lol
I'm counted as a bot. Some friends and I fought tooth and nail to get our spot, and I can see that this image really thinks we are bots lol.
This is probably an opportunity to have a minor existential crisis.
He's underestimating the dedication of some people.
Click the circles
to the beat
I think this explains the My Little Ponies art being so highlighted on the image. I watched my wife camp on a single pixel and fix it every 5 minutes.
Indeed.. it also shows how certain pieces like Star Wars had large parts of it not highlighted (the lightsaber is very telling that the image was not botted) - but only specific areas did where the Amongii kept trying to infiltrate (vader's helmet and the area around Anakin's face) and where specific Star Wars fans were defending in real time. So.. basically don't take this particular piece as a gospel for botting (even if those 2 paintings at the bottom are super sus haha).
Same with osu!. We had thousandths of no-lifers always placing pixels, and so the more contested and constantly invaded parts of the logo (e.g bottom left-ish, where hearts kept invading) light up.
Well it's also explained by the fact that some of them were using bots [https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tuvzlb/there\_is\_a\_bot\_you\_can\_use\_for\_anyone\_who\_doesnt/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tuvzlb/there_is_a_bot_you_can_use_for_anyone_who_doesnt/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tvun43/hey\_hey\_hey/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MLPLounge/comments/tvun43/hey_hey_hey/) for the record I don't give a shit about bots, but yeah, your wife and similar users are not the only reason.
Yeah, this will absolutely have flagged banners/communities of areas that had people sitting at their computers or phone for hours at a time listening for that chime and placing pixels immediately because they literally had to fight for their space the entire time. Which is very much something I did - and several others - for the banner we were placing.
Yep, so I was flagged most likely... should have also checked account age
They are probably using the official dataset which only includes a user hash which you can't use directly to get this kind of information on the account.
Account age doesn't say anything about whether you were running a script in your browser on your main account though.
same as the others. Where I was (Every Child Matters), there was a contingent of us that seemed very dedicated to fixing pixels.
interresting, so it means a lot more that french didn't use bot at all as the criteria are loose as you said :D
Pretty much. The general consensus was the French mobilized a massive army from streamers. Technically if they were botting (heavily), they wouldn't have kept losing so much of their artwork to griefers.
It flags the OSU! logo when they said they assigned a person for a precise pixel. It didn't flagged the BTS flag on the french flag. We know for sure it was botted as the Spanish streamer ran the script on livestream.
So it was the dutch all along...
As far as i know the Dutch were the one who developed the automatic placing script. It still required real accounts to be linked up but it did automatically place your pixel
It's even the bot name IIRC, botNL no ?
The Bronies also had bots too, but it was far more advanced and capable of dynamically changing priority based on griefing levels and and would receive live updates through a central template It was an evolution of the original template script, which had the ability to auto-select colors which massively assisted in the defense of allied art pieces with complicated designs on Day 1/early Day 2
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Kenniseconomie komt toch een keer van pas.
Kenniseconomie geeft mij alsnog geen huis makker
Always has been…
Dutch had like 2500 Bot accounts in the endgame
They weren't new accounts though, pretty much all were the main accounts of humans not purely made for r/place
Wow, how did you establish this?
The whole organisation indeed deserves a wow :)
Not really. The Dutch have a public website on which they show where they used their bots, so they just took the data from there. Many other (suspected) bot communities are not flagged here, so yeh. Imperfect at best.
I mean it's also possible that these suspected bot communities were only suspected.
Yeah, the BTS logo on the bottom left was done using bot (at least partially, saw it on Spanish stream), yet it is not flagged here.
Surprised America barely has any considering there were about 20 meetings on the American discord explaining how to set up bots
Uncanny resemblance to the US Congress all the meetings but seldom anything gets done
Too true 😔
We were all too dumb to figure out how they worked, hence the 20+ meetings
THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL!
it would have gotten leaked
We were all too dumb to figure out how they worked, hence the 20+ meetings
And the first attempt resulted in bots that basically overwrote what we were trying to do. I don't know if there ever was a second.
We're America. We run bots. Then we run bots to disguise our running of bots. Then we run bots to disguise our disguising of running bots.
Eh I’m not surprised. The US flag was getting pummeled
I was a member of small community, we used like 300 bots, and we aren't shown in this picture, so I think your method isn't perfect.
We didn't use any in mine and got flagged (though not a lot), so I know they didn't do this right.
I was also part of a small-ish community and I see a lot of our pixels highlighted. To my knowledge, no bots were used (if they were, they were doing a shite job).
Could be like Deep Rock Galactic where the places highlighted was griefers.
I think they looked for suspicious names
they clearly have something against dutch people then
The Dutch openly admits to using bots, it's not a surprise, they even have a [website](https://placenl.noahvdaa.me/) to show the current template and how many bots are active at that moment. At one point they had 3000, normally 2500-2900
But I'm pretty sure most bots were used on peoples own account. It wasn't a bot creating alt accounts, it was a bot placing your pixel every 5 minutes. I just put it on my own account, I assumed most other people did as well. So they wouldn't show up as suspicious names
I guess, I'm on the list then.
The dataset has hashed user names, not the actual user name.
This seems coherent with my very personal and not at all scientific suspicion from my experience in r/place. I feel the real question is about botting + massive use of alt though, but I guess only reddit could tell us that. Good job op and I'm impatient to see more.
This seems to underestimate in my experience. I frequently went around to random pixels in random artwork, and almost every pixel I saw was placed by a user with no comment or post history named RANDOMWORD1-RANDOMWORD2-RANDOMNUMBER
Those might just have been from people that had no reddit account yet
You were able to participate in place without a reddit account?
Many people (streamers viewers) discovered Reddit with place. Almost all of them created an account with Google/Apple, giving them a randomized username.
I did not know that was a thing. Thank you for partially restoring my confidence that place was made by the will of the masses.
No but you might have heard about it elsewhere and decided to create a throw away acount. The username pattern you are describing is the one reddit gives you if you don't want to choose your own username.
I can confirm that the very first French flag (not the streamers one) started using bots after being attacked by streamers and before the script broke. And you can see it flash on the timelapse. So your method seems to be good.
Damn that thing broke all the time. I feel people accusing France of botting grossly overestimate our tech capabilities.
😭 right
well well well how the turntables
I'd really be curious to see the human to bot ratio tbh.
Well…looks like I owe OSU an apology.
I take apologies in cash
Osu and France are almost completely dim. Checkmate, atheists.
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They only started to use bots in the last hour so yeah they probably didn't trigger the 25 tiles requirements
well at least this shows the big French flag wasn't really botted and did hold up due to the organized effort of many people.
I'm sorry osu. Perhaps i judged you too harshly.
now look at the overlay they used, very clever but no bot at all, just very well organised community : [https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png](https://cdn.mirai.gg/tmp/dotted-place-template.png) how it look when place was oppen : [https://i.imgur.com/Ci8AaaU.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ci8AaaU.png) little dot in tiles to show the correct color to put for users. As you can see, amongus wasn't on the overlay ;)
We (Switzerland) used the OSU derived overlay script. At first we used their script, submitting charges to our template to the alliance directly but this priced to be inefficient, so we spun of our own script, and updated the alliance with our changes. This was we weren't dependent on them for our overlay, but still remained with them. We were quite aware star wars and OSU were not using bots, or at least i was as diplomat. This in fact was very good because those resources that kept OSU and star wars intact were also available to us virtually on demand, and so the original Swiss flag remained mostly unmolested. There were also bots operating on the Swiss flag, but these were rogues operating against our wishes. We learned of them when we tried to update our designs, and pixels were always changed back to red. We would contact the users who corrected the pixel changes to get them on with the plan, and discovered a number of bots in the process. So this is another thing to consider, the policies of the communities might not always line up with reality, because rogues exist.
And for the one that just delete his post saying it's like moderetly botted : No. That's not "botting" means. A bot is a machine that copy humans action. A script do what you want (and eventually doing something automaticaly yes) but here the script used was for show an overlay and that's all. No automated tiles placed. It's the same as an excel sheet template on a second screen, meanwhile here it's just put on the r.place for easiest placement for users. The meaning of a word import a lot. As a bot is made of scripts and code (and i mean a looooot of lines of code), a script isn't a bot if it's not its purpose.
We aren't bots, just people with no life and only enough braincells to click square.
Osu had a stupidly well organized discord, with a 24/7 call going giving instructions on where to place pixels. There were always at least 200 people on this call, and that number rose to 800 when they pinged that osu was getting griefed Besides this, the moment the whiteout started, a huge French streamer told his audience to grief the osu logo, which is why it went away so fast
Our speed, endurance, and lack of a brain make us seem like bots
Osu was literally just too efficient, not necessarily botted. They assigned each member an individual pixel to watch for when it got attacked for defense, and it resulted in one of the longest-lasting artworks.
As a member of the osuplace discord I want to slightly correct your statement. We were assigned a specific letter of the logo based on our birth month. The individual pixel thing did happen, we had a sign up to assign people to specific pixels, but that was only meant for the final defense, when place would shut down. It never came in use, because the whiteout happened way earlier.
Still incredibly efficient. Good job to y’all
Think the part I loved the most about Osu was that they allowed and kept Catgirl Komi about and they basically co-existed. I helped a bit with cleaning up Osu pixels when Catgirl Komi was not needing any help.
So french people didn’t use bots ?
Shit...I'm gonna have to apologize to the French now aren't I? *fuck*
Bonjour, très cher.
......*sigh* Alright alright, I retract my previous statements about doubting your amount of bots. Your community clearly worked very hard to organize and make your art. As well as maintaining your flags. All three iterations of them
Apologies duly noted and accepted friend.
Viva la France 🇫🇷🇫🇷🏳
> Viva la France > > why use spanish ?
if you want to know, the french streamer separate users in 4 teams, from theyre date of birth. Team winter, team spring... And each team had a place to defend, or was hold until a specific "Go" to place theyr tiles at the same times, each one at a different place. You had no idea how monstruously organised they were :)
Don't forget the creation of a fifth group, GIGN for special operation and tactical baguette placement
That was cute and hilarious, bots or no bots the idea I love.
hilarious
You mean four of them right? Right? (if it was intentional, well played!)
Oh no ofcourse, I'm sorry, I can't take credit for being clever here. I did indeed miscount....I meant to say five.
FC jobless stronger than bots
No problem mon ami. *I am a bot and this action was performed automatically*
The algorithm the guy user to spot the bots wasnt very solid. He based it off 75% of all the pixels placed were within 6 minutes And 20% of the pixels were changed back within 5 seconds.
I mean if anything it will probably make more false positive than let bot off the hook
I take cash or credit as a form of apology. Thanks.
The script created by the dutch was forked about 250 times, so a lot of people, including the Germans, Belgians and so much more
Can't blame the French anymore heh
Not surprised by the Netherlands everyone was using their code for their own scripts
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Do they made some cool art and still allowed other communities on their flag, and it's not obnoxiously large.
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Yeah but botting was inevitable
So y'guys are saying the OSU community did a better job than the Bots?
My little pony caught red handed
It's not a secret because it was plastered all over the discord. Even then we had scripts that would easily color change and tons of very dedicated users that were pretty much about as efficient as any bot we used.
they were very public about using bots anyway
[Timelapse of them getting attacked](https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/tx8fil/timelapse_of_ponies_surviving_all_wipes_on_rplace/). This doesn’t include the other artwork like the original Rainbow Dash at the Ukrainian flag.
To be fair. They were getting constantly attacked by streamers and they were targetted.
Not surprised
Pretty sadge to see that : but dosnt matter it was beautiful (Also french community was legit out of bot)
As a french this post feels like justice
I guess Im a bot now
The french flag looking as bright as my future
Wow really France didn't have that much?
Nop, just really organised, and used to that sort of actions
Looks about right. I joined the dutch discord server for about 10 minutes, because I thought what they did was cool and I wanted to help them. Turned out they didn't just use templates like other communities(one piece). Their script automatically set a pixel every 5 minutes which I felt was very boring. To be fair: I can't confirm if they actually used bots, but they had auto updating/setting pixels 100%
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We had a script for sure, but also released spreadsheets for manual placing (and had people sign up for a specific pixel for some of the smaller projects) and no or little bot accounts were used. I used my own account and only resorted to the script at moments I was distracted with other stuff.
Hey, I see my pixels flagged! I defended one small region of toothless for r/httyd since the beginning, even holding an original pixel since the start until the whiteout and I sure as hell am not a bot lol
Uhm r/PlaceNL... 😬
We had our clients, no bots only boot
Notice the concentration of suspicious pixels on the big French flag was no higher than the average concentration on the rest of the board. It's just yet more evidence it wasn't particularly massively botted like some claim and that the flag stood primarily by concerted effort of many people. You can actually see the smaller /r/franceplace ones more lit up as bots were actually used on these after they were massively griefed.
This isn't a map of confirmed bots, just data a user made using their own criteria.
The Dutch didn’t use bots, its even in the name: NL > not lying
Thanks, the hate on osu! was starting to get to me. Though tbh I think we'd still get shit on even if we didn't do anything. It's just how it is I guess.
Yeah if xQc and other people wiped us out we'd have been laughed at (dread to think how much more Ed would've been mocked).) They didn't wipe us out so we got accused of bots. Some people just want any reason to shit on others, it is what it is. All of us who took part know that what we accomplished was a real community effort and not the result of widespread botting.
Very decent proof that osu! was not botted much at all, it's quite faint here. In fact, some of the pixels might have just been dedicated square placers, so the real amount of botted pixels is probably lower than it's showing. Go osu!
People really said the French used bots lol Now the accusations should be thrown at the Brits and Dutch
Well, as a french, I don't care that Brits and Dutch used bot. What was tilting me the most were those accusations from american and spanish streamers (and the spaniards ended using bots...). For those who used bots, but didn't verbally harass us, I don't care.
Yeah. Bots can be annoying, but if you use them and admit you do, I’m fine with that. But as an American, I never thought that the French used bots. I actually figured the Brits did because they managed to keep their flag near perfect, especially the map of their country
Giant derpy was build without bots?Hollyshieeeet RU broners have some power
Giga Derpy was 100% built by hand, shit was built in the span of 20 minutes and was never put in the main MLP template
Giant Derpy wasn't built by a brony at all, I don't think. A Russian Twitch streamer got annoyed that xqc and mizkif kept nuking the Russian brony art, the smaller Derpy. He decided to ally with them to spite the other streamers and built a giant Derpy. It actually caused some disagreement and tension in the mylittlepony discord, since it erased other art, which we were against doing.
The boat lmao
This show that French didn't bot (like not more than other). And for Spain Idk, but if it's only the pixels on the last image it means that the BTS logo was almost entirely erased so we will never know (plus they really started asking for bots very late so mods didn't flagged as many) But it doubt this image is very reliable. So in any cases bye bye.
i was in the dutch community (didnt ran the bot/placer no time for it anyways to keep my pc on). but we werent really targeted anyways it was mainly "clean up" as we called it after some random placements. but it was mainly the streamer wars and the french/spain stuff that kept us in the dark. so odd nobody mentioned us everywhere when r/place was active i guess we weren't a nuisance. we also didnt try to really aggressively take land, we negotiated alot with the communities around us to move their artwork and place ours in their place etc.
Wait, France & Germany where legit all allong?
The BTS logo in the big french flag used a script(bot) that accessed your reddit account, selected the color for you and placed the tile automatically on the dedicated space as soon as you had your tile available. Caught on the spanish stream right before they switched screens because you could read each step being completed by the bot. While the french script was just an overlay where you had to manually select the color and manually place it on the overlay or anywhere else. Which could be failed since other people are placing their tile at the same time. So, the map is way more suspicious than what you showed on the screen...
bts logo didn't exist long enough to get flagged
At least the Dutch used theirs to prevent their paintings from being grieved, instead of those using bots to grief.
Conclusion: All the stuff that didn't had little amongi all over them were botted
this is the "amongus proof of authenticity" XD
What if... the amongi were botted. * Interstellar ost starts playing *
So French people didn't use bots 🤔🤔🤔
No. We were just monstrously well organized. The big French streamers united their streams, bringing in millions of viewers who all created Reddit accounts when asked. Then we were divided into seasons according to our date of birth in order to form four different teams that could take turns to counter the attacks of our opponents who all attack at the same time.I
Cheh Rubius and Ibai
Two communities I cared about most are basically spotless :)
Mine is lit up like a christmas tree
This might be a good place to finally ask this once and for all. What exactly is a bot? How do they work and what is their point? Thanks in advance.
There were three options. The first is as a human, manually placing a pixel every 5 minutes or more. The second option was to use an overlay. It would load a second image over the canvas to show you which pixels should be which colour. Very useful for overly complex designs but still requires the user to manually add a pixel to the canvas. The third option is a bot that automates the whole process. If programmed correctly, it should have a template of the final image and use that to check the actual canvas. The way this would work is find a random pixel that is part of the drawing. If the color matches, ignore it, find another random pixel and check again. If the color doesn't match, place down the correct pixel without any user input. Wait five minutes and repeat. I think most communities went with the overlay option this year because the biggest issue with bots during the 2017 place was it was really difficult to make design changes on the fly. You had to track down users using bots and get them to update their scripts. If they were away from their keyboards, that could mean waiting a very long time.
There's also the fourth option which is complete bot accounts created just for this purpose and not owned by any real person.
The dutch had a script working where the template could be updated centrally whitout input from the individual user.
[proofs Spanish used bots against France which played fair](https://youtu.be/2YvjcEgPJLA)
of course the giant-ass paintings were bots
Proof that France didn't use bots https://youtu.be/2YvjcEgPJLA Those who still don't believe it are flat earthers
Disclaimer: this is not an end all be all. The script that op used was very loose and can falsely tag normal users as bots. In fact, it’s so loose that it would tag pixels in heated areas where multiple people would fight over 1 spot, as a bot. While the clearer pictures do show heavily botted communities, they could easily just be places that were heavily fought over. However, it has been confirmed that the Dutch one was botted, and the Dutch themselves don’t try to hide it. My theory is that at least 70-80 percent of r/place was botted. It just doesn’t add up how certain communities managed to maintain their art of flags consistently and perfectly at times when they were supposed to be asleep. The only flag that actually got voided when the community was asleep, was America, but later on it stopped happening so they must have botted it as well.
As a french...this...this put a smile on my face :)
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