Wednesday, December 26, 2007

web test






it's been a nice relaxing holiday; another mindless webgame and the discovery of a new tool for the toolbox.

i've been playing with duels.com - a free webbased rpg geared ONLY for leveling characters. Not too thrilling once you realize how many mouseclicks are involved in the long run.

after reading one theory how to scam the system, i realized i may be wasting my time with the mouse and duels.com proposed traditional interface.

http://www.iopus.com/ makes a free browser plugin called iMacros - a toolkit to train a browser (or script it) to do web testing / automate web tasks from firefox, IE, vba, delphi, whatever.

one problem with duels.com is you can only fully interact with people logged in, so the lists are always changing. I thought I could just harvest userid's behind the scenes and interact with those directly, but it needs tokens from the browser session to build the challenges - so numbers alone of people most likely offline are not going to help me. After pasting a table of live data table from duels.com of users logged in into EXCEL, i stumbled across the fact excel can live-query a table on a webpage, and it was a hop skip and a jump to punching that into iMacros. See associated screenshots for excel, and iMacros running. THe most annoying thing about my knowledge and EXCEL? the absence of a full carriage return line feed character - I can put a LINE FEED char(10) into a string, but then need to cut/paste to word for that to automagically convert it to a real carriage return line feed so I can paste it into imacros.

i'm sure I could script the whole process, but now with about 10 keyboard commands I can automate about 8 minutes of work for my duels.com account - and in only a few hours went from 3 days of screwing around a few hours a day (44,000 experience) to this morning; 77,000 experience. so it seems to be working.

21 comments:

k2h said...

thats pretty weird, i just ran across imacro today, before reading your post.

Unknown said...

jen, maybe you can use the macro recorder for quickly pulling up open classes at a certain time.

forkev said...

i've already had messages asking for more details: for those that cannot see pictures, consider example code -

URL GOTO=http://www.duels.com/alias
CLICK X=853 Y=146
URL GOTO=http://www.duels.com/alias
CLICK X=744 Y=146
CLICK X=256 Y=1071
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:IMAGE FORM=ACTION:/challenges/challenge

Unknown said...

free only as a trial.... but i'll have to look for something similar as open source and see if i can't get this working for auto-populating a class schedule for advisees.

forkev said...

"iMacros for Firefox is free for personal and commercial use." I think it's free for FF.

link

forkev said...

chickenfoot for firefox may also be a solution; and you could use Greasmonkey to bind it together with logic if you needed it.

Unknown said...

who wanted to see more pics? did you actually snag a real life internet reader with your article?

k2h said...

i went through the logs and i'm going to give a big fat guess that some one from israel inquired.

Unknown said...

thanks for the links kev.... i might also look into web harvest and get this thing working....
the sad part is that i could totally make advising more reliable if i had the time/mental power to do some programming to interface with our database to get each advisees data... but at least this will save me about 15 min per person per quarter

forkev said...

the inquiry came through duels.com chat/msg - and after some more googling it appears scripting is against their idea of fair play - but I cannot find it mentioned in their TOS - SO, i'll leave the article AND stop scripting against it (with imacros) as I begin researching client side proxies.

forkev said...

after spending a week of evenings playing with other tools i've come full circle back to my first love (and even mentioned a few posts back) wget.

just note, if using wget on windows, read the fine print on one of the readme files; to do a post and initialze the cookies:

wget --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt --post-data="user=foo&passwor=bar" -O out.txt http://www.google.com

and then follow up same session with other posts referncing cookie:

wget --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt --post-data="data[User][username]=name&data[User][password]=pcode" -O out.txt http://64.131.85.94/users/login

the tricky part here is the syntax for post-data is DIFFERENT then most published documentation, requiring = and ", not --post-data 'data=1&data=2' with single quotes and no = like on must *nix implementations.

k2h said...

hey, now thats some good info on wget right there. i'm probably over a month away from implementing wget in one of my solutions at work, but i'm pretty sure you just saved me some time with that. thanks!

forkev said...

150 lines in visualbasic.net and wget is a real workhorse. I even have some VERY simple logic solving a CAPTCHA. interesting.

anyone nerd want to play with my .exe, let me know.

Robert Whitefield said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Robert Whitefield said...

you got it

forkev said...

we'll see if robert becomes another believer in wget.

k2h said...

Robert wrote:
Interesting idea using wget. I played with it some time ago but couldn't get any real results. I would love to see what you ave done with it.

original post deleted so the spiders don't get the email.

Unknown said...

Hello, I'm currently coding program for duels.com, I have made and auto-challenge script, I'll upgrade it for make the challenge for you level on any online guy or you can edit this option. Currently working on a auto-level/auto-quest bot, working great atm.

http://duels-automate.angelfire.com/

feel free to email me for any question or suggestion.

Admin,

Duels.Automate

admin.duels.automate@gmail.com

k2h said...

awesome kev. look what you've done, you have spawned a copy cat that charges! now why didn't you think of a revenue source like our modern entrepreneurial admin.

KAN said...

funny thing is I still get the duels.com e newsletter even though they banned me - can't even log in to unsubscribe.

Unknown said...

Just write a letter to the appropriated department on duels.com to ask to remove you from the newletter.

Yeah, a source of revenue, coding is not free and updates too.

Is not bad 5$/months for automate your 10 characters. It's a good method to be rich without spending lots money in the game. Lvl 40+ chars is 8 token per win, if you win 15/25 it will give you 120 token on each chars (10) per hours. Sleep the night an average of 8hours + work = a minimum of 960 token every morning on each of you characters! Free packs every day without spending much time.
In like 1-3 days you can get 5000 on you 10 chars, it give you a greater chances to get legendary item and artifact.

You can spend much more than 5$ / month for get less result..


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