Monday, September 26, 2011

FreeRice updated

Do you still remember the FreeRice bot I wrote years ago?

I'm not sure if the bot is still working but recently I received an email from the United Nations World Food Programme saying that it "has been highly damaging to Freerice and has serious repercussions for the people we help". Below are the three reasons given:

- You overload our servers and crash the site, so that real people cannot play and learn. This means less people want to play, and we raise less rice.
- You damage our reputation and discourage sponsors from supporting Freerice, making it impossible for us to pay for the rice you raise. This means we cannot provide rice to those who need it most
- At times, the bots raise more rice than we can pay for!

Apparently, there have been many bots created since then and I wonder if my bot alone can damage the site that much but for now I have removed the bot from the downloads. If you are a bot author, maybe you should consider doing the same.

Statistically, about 40% of the visitors to my site are for the bot. Well, that gotta change now!