does ssl help with anything as far as security?
I didn't yet test it, but I hope so. IMO, it's just gives a little security for accessing the site internally.
But what stop the bot's and cheaters is the e-mail blocker codes I put. I blocked most of the emails that are using yandex and a few others like mail.ru and gmail.com, because I found out that 80% (just my estimate) of my visitors and users are using e-mails from yandex and 90% of those 80% are using multiple accounts and bots.
I once set my reward to 1 satoshi and those users were continuously claiming for a week even if they only get 1 satoshi, that's the time I decided to block those e-mails.
And now, I only got few visitors and losing a maximum of 10K to 15K sato a day unlike previously which I lost 50K to 100K a day.