adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Jan 10, 2016 10:00:32 GMT
...and it won't mess with shrapnel either. 8>. I can't help but feel that a nice citizen's bot WOULD "mess with shrapnel". Look at it from the seller's side. He puts a wodge up for a sale - let's say it's £147.03. He could VERY easily be left with 3p on the market, and - worst of all - he won't get the £147 until that 3p sells. But, no, all the buyers are turning up their noses at it... I can see a time when the SM is full of pennies here, pennies there, and nobody wants to buy them - so there's hundreds, thousands of pounds in 99% sold parts that aren't being distributed.
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Jan 10, 2016 10:16:27 GMT
My 'nice' bot will buy the whole £147.03 IFF I want that much, or more. What it won't do is buy the 0.03p left, if someone else takes the £147. Why would I want a 3p loan part that takes as much effort to manage as a real one, but generates no interest?
SS really ought prevent shrapnel getting formed in the first place.
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littleoldlady
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Running down all platforms due to age
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Post by littleoldlady on Jan 10, 2016 12:10:13 GMT
I'm all for Bot free zone so I have answered "Yes" but I don't currently believe there are bots in use. Demand is much higher than Supply. I can pick up a lot on SM if I can be bothered to sit and refresh and use fast fingers. Do you still think this. Any other bot deniers still out there?
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ilmoro
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'Wondering which of the bu***rs to blame, and watching for pigs on the wing.' - Pink Floyd
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Post by ilmoro on Jan 10, 2016 12:30:45 GMT
I'm all for Bot free zone so I have answered "Yes" but I don't currently believe there are bots in use. Demand is much higher than Supply. I can pick up a lot on SM if I can be bothered to sit and refresh and use fast fingers. Do you still think this. Any other bot deniers still out there? I suspect it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's been so much discussion of whether there were or werent bots, that even if there werent at the beginning of the discussion (and I wasnt convinced there were, at least in significant numbers) there certainly are now. Whether SS should do anything about it is entirely up to what they see the purpose of the SM for and the wider impact on the platform. If the SM is solely (as its mission statement suggests) to allow people to sell their loans, then the fact those loans sell in in nanoseconds rather than seconds means bots arent an issue. If, as seems likely given some of the sums being acquired are significant, bots are being used by BHs then it probably isnt going to have an impact on SS ability to fill large loans so unlikely to damage the platform too much from that point of view. Only if it prevents sufficient lenders from achieving diversification in a reasonable amount of time will it become an issue, that seems to be in the balance, but only SS can see the actual impact based on net withdrawls by frustrated investors. For disclosure. I dont have a bot, no idea how to construct one. I have been on SS from the relatively early days of boat loans so had the frustrations of FFF then but have subsequently built up holdings over time so now Im not too bothered about SM but just grow organically through pipeline allocations. I have recently referred relatives, also non bots, who have been able to diversify sufficiently over last 3 month period using SM/pipeline allocations.
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wysiati
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Post by wysiati on Jan 10, 2016 17:04:55 GMT
savingstream must take a stance on this and level out the playing field. Well, so far they have been more interested in blocking (no warnings either, just blocking) the IP addresses of manual secondary market purchasers who found that using a browser extension to auto refresh was necessary to have access and even attempt to compete with the bots, whilst leaving many fully automated tools to run amok.
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Post by sunspot on Jan 10, 2016 17:21:57 GMT
Continually refreshing any page might be mistaken for a DOS attack. In any case, banning would most likely be automatic, and therefore no warnings would be given.
Switch off your modem for 30 minutes, then turn back on again. With a bit of luck, you'll be allocated a new IP address, and hey presto, you'll be unbanned.
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oldgrumpy
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Post by oldgrumpy on Jan 10, 2016 17:29:26 GMT
Continually refreshing any page might be mistaken for a DOS attack. In any case, banning would most likely be automatic, and therefore no warnings would be given. Switch off your modem for 30 minutes, then turn back on again. With a bit of luck, you'll be allocated a new IP address, and hey presto, you'll be unbanned.Magic. Just 30 minutes. Mint!  In the meantime, you have missed that loan part you were chasing because s**********m bought it 29 mins 59.999 secs before, together with 56 other loan parts. Fancy a banana?
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Post by sunspot on Jan 10, 2016 20:12:48 GMT
Well, if you're in a hurry, simply pressing the reset button on your modem might work. But I'd expect most people to try that first, followed by switching off for a few seconds.
In any case, it's better than 24 hours, or whatever penalty is applied.
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james
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Post by james on Jan 10, 2016 21:09:04 GMT
Getting a new IP address isn't going to do a lot of good when limits and bans are account-linked, not IP-linked. Though a site may well have both types for different purposes, IPs are useful for baby DOS attacks, though not the serious ones which try things like flooding the site's internet connection with hundreds of thousands or millions of clients and need different tools that aren't relevant to a bot discussion.
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Jan 10, 2016 21:48:44 GMT
Getting a new IP address isn't going to do a lot of good when limits and bans are account-linked, not IP-linked. Not just me thinking "Why on earth would they block an IP address, when you're logged in to your account, so they know EXACTLY who it is?"...
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Post by sunspot on Jan 10, 2016 21:56:39 GMT
Well, the bans MUST be based on IP address. If they were account-based, users would still be able to see the site, but not log in. And if they were based on cookies, simple deletion would suffice.
Any such bans will almost certainly be the result of automated software, running at a low level, without any operator intervention. Indeed, having just checked, it seems that a company called CloudFlare provides the necessary hosting - they are most likely responsible for bans, not Saving Stream.
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Jan 10, 2016 22:28:27 GMT
Those sort of bans are generally automatically generated based on 'excessive' traffic levels. SS have gone to a lot of trouble to give us a self-renewing 'available loans' page which doesn't require much data transfer, so I can see why they'd be upset at 'autoreload the whole damn tab' .. that's 61kb when everything is cached, 600kb from empty caches .. vs .05 kb for their API call to decide whether to redraw or not .. i.e. autorefresh the tab is hitting them for 1200x as much data as sitting back and waiting (best case .. worst case is 12,000x).
But to get back on track, the basic problem is not bots, the basic problem is that demand (from lenders) exceeds supply by a wide margin, and there is no balancing mechanism (like changing the price) or rationing mechanism (like some sort of 'fair shares' or queue) to resolve it. If you ban bots you just have 'fastest finger first (mostly folks who can be active at midnight, or who employ a liveware proxy in India). SS really need to concentrate on pumping up the deal flow as #1, and thinking about how to manage supply/demand imbalances, if they can't, as #2 (negative cashback?! Premium to SS on all SM trades?? .. me, I'd rather have that queue!). What S<lotsof*>m has bought today, if their bot was banned, wouldn't have kept three of us happy for ten minutes, because basically nobody was selling... yeah Ok, they got an unfair* share, but it was an unfair* share of 'not very much'
* as a percentage of their demand, or as a percentage of what was sold, or whatever .. perhaps not 'in relation to the effort they put in to get it' though?
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ablender
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Post by ablender on Jan 10, 2016 23:14:51 GMT
s******m is not something that cropped up recently. I remember that from sometime ago. I'll try to find where and when.
It was s***r that I was referring to not s*****m.
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Post by sunspot on Jan 11, 2016 0:04:28 GMT
Glancing at the activity for a single loan, it's easy to see that at least four bots are currently being tested this evening. <Added> d**e just picked up £93 of PBL071 in less than a second. £170 of PBL040 equally quickly. |
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sqh
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Post by sqh on Jan 11, 2016 0:34:32 GMT
Glancing at the activity for a single loan, it's easy to see that at least four bots are currently being tested this evening. <Added> d**e just picked up £93 of PBL071 in less than a second. £170 of PBL040 equally quickly. I sold these two loanparts and £59 of PBL068 (also went to d**e). They all sold extremely fast. PBL068 was actually the 2nd loan I sold, so guess it went so fast you blinked.
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