Because this kind of thing happens regularly (and more than ever lately!), I want to share my stance on this stuff.
If you are using a bot on Hamumu for any purpose, or trying to hack into the site, you are being at best extremely annoying and at worst extremely destructive.
It's not cool, it's not helpful, it's not a funny prank, and it breaks games for everybody as well as forcing me to spend my time developing enhanced security rather than more games. It wastes the bandwidth I pay for, it ruins the fun of games people want to play, it wastes my time making blocks to prevent it. I mean we can see it happen in the people getting mad about the bot playing Great Pumpkin's Field today. You're ruining the game for people and turning people off of my site. If you have something against me and want to hurt me, you're doing the right thing. If you want to help me out and help the community in some way,
you're doing it wrong.
At various times in the past I've had a bunch of people come to me and say they hacked something on the site (usually meaning they found a file that's not supposed to be seen publicly), and they think they're helping me. You're NOT HELPING. The only people who have ever "hacked" this site are the people who thought they were helping me out. I don't need to put in safeguards for what you're doing because
you're the only one doing it! If you'd stop "helping me", no such safeguards would be needed!
And to clarify, that doesn't mean you shouldn't point out if you see something broken or you stumble across something that you shouldn't be able to get into. By all means, let me know. I can't verify everything on the site myself and I rely on reports from the users. This is a message for people who are performing attacks on my site and my games, not people who innocently hit something.
It's a terrible dirty feeling to discover someone hacking around the site. Compare it to your house. Do you want masked people prowling around your yard just testing all the window locks for you? Or stealing your car to point out to you that you shouldn't have left the keys in it?
I can't tell you how crappy my day is when I spend a couple hours of it at war with one of my friends instead of making fun stuff. I understand that I have to battle people. Spammers show up, angry ex-members appear and try to trash the site. Those are fights I'm happy to have, I will slay the evil (well, I'd rather nobody attacked me, but I feel good about taking them down). But when my friends show up and force me to engage them in an electronic cat & mouse game, it's absolutely infuriating! Why am I wasting my time fighting battles against the very people who supposedly appreciate what I do?
So this isn't a message for evil people who want to mess with my site. Those people will do bad things because they want bad things to happen. This is a big, bold, strongly worded message to all you young programmers who are using my site as a testbed for your programs, all you white-hat hackers who are looking for exploits, and all you petty vandals who just want to get some "lulz" (hello, comment spammers), everybody who thinks they're helping or just having fun via non-sanctioned channels. What you're doing is harmful to me and to the community at large. I hope people will sign on to this in the comments, but the recent Great Pumpkin thread should be evidence enough. People don't like what you're doing, and I know I don't like it.
Key tip: If you want to help somebody, ask them if you can help. If you have to do your helping in the shadows behind their back, odds are they don't want you doing it. I'm not EA, some monolithic entity you can't speak to that operates a faceless website with an army of engineers preparing it for cyberwar. I'm just a guy running a site on my own, and I respond to any question you have. Maybe there's some cool bot you want to run that I wouldn't mind. Seems like asking me would be the polite thing to do.
Hamumu Rule #1 Since Day 1: BE NICE TO EVERYBODY ALL THE TIME. That includes me.
