I want to talk about something today, and I'll start by saying I think running a faucet is a wonderful thing, visitors turn up on a website and generate ad revenue for the owner, the owner then pays the visitor for their trouble - the advertiser is happy because their ad campaign is getting interest, the visitor is happy because they get a payout without being misled or wasting time, and the owner is happy because he gets his cut. There's a balance to be found, but once you find it you're left with a win-win-win situation where all parties can participate and walk away happy. It's beautiful, really. I support anybody who's operating a a faucet, hell I've even donated to some.
But, a while back bots turned up and started burning profitable faucets to the ground left right and center. I know how much that stung because my own (hugely unprofitable) faucets were targeted, but a few hours after I spotted them, I had developed a solution which
stopped them in their tracks and was completely invisible to the visitor (I can explain how this worked if anybody is interested, but it's outside the scope of this update)
At some point in all this, however, someone else saw this as an opportunity to turn a quick buck or just plain didn't understand what was happening and hacked in a terrible 'fix' in the form of these 'anti-bot' buttons. You've all no doubt seen these by now, a number of links must be clicked before the reward can be claimed to prevent 'bots' from running wild. The problem - as has been explained elsewhere on this board - is that this is all nonsense. The links do literally zero to prevent a bot from making a claim. They are a purely client-side UI element which serves no perceivable purpose beyond generating accidental ad clicks. All any person or bot needs to do is post the address field and the captcha, anything else a faucet makes you do is just fluff, and if the thing it makes you do serves no purpose and results in accidental ad clicks, then that thing is a waste of the your time and the advertiser's money. To emphasise how pointless the 'anti-bot' links are,
here's a video of me circumventing them manually by using the inspector to just replace one of them with a submit button.
Anti-bot buttons are a pointless waste of time which shifts that beautiful balance of the faucet concept from a 'win-win-win' scenario into a 'win-annoy-lose' and this is no good. But, this is a client-side 'feature' and the client is ours to control, so I've developed a very straightforward firefox addon which is allows you to submit a form by right clicking on an input field and clicking "submit form" on the drop-down menu. You can see it in action on a faucet with 'anti-bot' buttons
here. To use it, first follow
these steps to prevent faucets from blocking your ability to use right-click. Then install
the addon to allow submitting forms from the context menu. Go to your faucets, enter your address, complete the captcha, right-click the address field, choose "submit form" and you're done.
The addon is only available for Firefox just now, but I'm working on porting it to other browsers. I'll post a further update when the other browser versions are available.
Oh one more thing:
Thank you for having looked, but unfortunately, I still have the problem
It's fixed now