FC answers some Qs

I was quite interested in your Q8 (reproduced below with answer from David T)

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Q8) Are you ever going to throttle bot bidding speed (apart from the accidental side effect of trapped bids)? You have the technology .. I assume.


A8) We do have the tech to limit but at the moment it would be a rather ‘clumsy’ process. Automatically banning accounts by techniques such as IP blacklisting can cause problems for legitimate users. We have recently banned a number of repeat offenders and will be looking a further methods to reduce misuse.

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So it would seem that some bid bot accounts have already been banned. What I'd like to know is: What did these bid-bots do to get banned which all the other bid-bots haven't done. Was it bidding too much (has the tall one been spotted this week?) or bidding too many times, or what? What constitutes misuse exactly?

If I ever find out I will be sure and let you know, however the only thing I can image I was doing yesterday, different from the last 12 months, was trying (in vain) to access loan request data when the site was down. Certainly not bidding too much or fast, I have reduced that since my initial efforts (back in about Jan 2014) (speed by ~10x and number of bids by 3-4x) to try to 'play nicely'. Perhaps talking to a dead site is regarded as naughty? .. they have yet to tell me (I'm certainly not a repeat offender, as far as I know .. not even had a yellow card or a caution, despite asking them a couple of times in case I was upsetting their system(s)).

I'm not sure the tall one uses a bidbot anyway, he/she just throws in £960 bids as fast as he/she an push the button .. not like it's a whole bunch of bids, only normally a dozen or so (which is already quite a lot of loot*) and they are usually a) early (to fill the loan up and lock autobid out) or b) last minute (or last 30 seconds!) (to secure parts), Between times, no activity much as far as I can tell.

b*z(****) is much more active all through the auction, and is almost surely a bot or bots **. There are several others (me included, although I'm limiting number of bids (10-12), % of auction (<10%), bid rate (2-3 seconds per), and various other parameters, all of which could easily be exceeded (and are, by most of the bots out there)). If the site can't cope with 10 bids in a  minute, they need a new site. Well, OK, we know they do ..

I did get a response from FC confirming they had blocked the IP address I was using at the time, apologising for me/the customer support reps not having been informed before, during, or after, but failing (so far) to give details of why ('we are taking no further action on this occasion' they say, which sort of implies no just cause was identified) .. I suspect there may BE no very good reason, except their site was broken so they shot-gunned everything which "might be a cause". I shall continue to enquire, since I have no desire to cause any problem, but it's kind of hard to achieve that if they can't tell me what the problem was / might be. Could just be that I failed to stop trying fast enough when the site was down, which is possible to remedy (tick, done).

One wonders whether b*z(****) et al got caught in the same shotgun blast. 8>.


* - of course just one £960 bid can kick out 48 bids of £20, which means 48 transaction reports to be snopaked out, which results in a lot of system activity (and trapped bids) one suspect.


** or  teams of button pushers based in India, etc?

FWIW, I am not so convinced that some of the larger participants mentioned use bid bots. Heterogeneity of bidding patterns would be another factor; taking your/pepperpot's examples T******i and B******a can appear inconsistent in terms of bid levels and amounts and there is not consistent rebidding of knocked out allocations from what I have seen. Even J*B*****n (previously (B*z)) with a more rules based approach does not necessarily automatically 'rebid' if knocked out. This suggests more direct real-time discretion (and/or lack of automation) is being exercised than with your typical autobot. The last two bidders mentioned rarely seem to participate at the end of auctions presumably as rates are too low and the larger loan requests are more likely to be crowded (seller) trades.

Hmm, I suppose it is possible that rather than a real AI-type bot, they just use a rapid-fire autobidder, where they manually point it at an auction with a number of bids (and bid value, but that's always £960 in this case) and off it goes at the maximum sustainable rate (which I have previously measured at 2-4 bids per second - any faster and (some) bids get lost - but that is still 10-20 times faster than 'wait for the bid button to light up' bidding rates of 2-3 seconds per bid). That's a lot easier to produce than a general AI type bot, especially since we know he/she/it ignores all rules on '10% of any one auction' etc.

You can do even 'better' / faster - just run multiple bidder instances on multiple PCs &/or multiple IP addresses, or even go for multiple user names (take a bow, Mr B*?) .. the only real limit is FC's server on the other end, although at some point the rapid bidding starts to look like a deliberate Denial of Service attack.

So is it/"X" a bot/autobidder? Well, if it hits bid rates of more than 20 bids in any one minute, I'd say it probably is (and an ill mannered one, which is ignoring the bid button response  cycle) .. fewer than that and 'it might be'. If it's responding to knocked out bids at 3:23 Am, it probably is as well, whatever its bid rate. I guess your line speed has some impact on this - gigabit broadband, and you'd suffer a lot less from the ridiculous amount of data FC sends out whenever you push a button - but again the FC server end is going be be the ultimate limit.

If the tall one is in London, or at some major university/hub, he/she will certainly have the possibility of broadband speeds that makes we rural dwellers look a bit Victorian, so don't judge what's possible by how fast your/my particular bit of damp string can run.

Yes I agree that if you keep under about three digital (finger) bids per second it will work in a quiet time on a good day. Go faster and it all gums up. End of auction is another thing altogether.

The ghost at this feast is that we are talking about chasing the rate and this is fun. Where else can you have such excitement and get your stake back if you lose? FOBTs can go spin their wheels! There are still the last minute blackouts, of course, but I suspect that most of us have found ways of living with them. Then, as the dust settles after a hectic auction end, we wait for Festive Capers to tell us if we are under invested or overhung. Then, on to the next one ...