SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Nov 17, 2016 19:05:12 GMT
I'm pretty sure there are bots buying. If someone has succeeded in writing a bot that can solve Google Captchas automatically, there are surely many more profitable uses to put it to than snaffling scraps on the SavingStream SM?
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twoheads
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Post by twoheads on Nov 17, 2016 19:11:49 GMT
I'm pretty sure there are bots buying. FFF is second class buying. I'm not so sure. Unless there is a captcha free 'back door' into buying loan parts (how good is the SS software team?) then the cost and difficulty of captcha solving would be prohibitive.
There are companies advertising captcha solvers, some hire real human beings working online for peanuts to solve them for their clients. But these cost money: would it be worth it? Not unless you are a VVBH. Then you have the expense of setting up your software to get your captchas outsourced and solved. And certainly the 'human powered' solution providers cannot promise to solve then as quickly as loan parts are snapped up.
It is also true that some 'transfers' of loan parts are prearranged and look, on the surface, much like 'bot buying'. Several mentions of this are on this forum including a guy who talked about moving funds between his account and his wife's. I believe that you have sell (e.g.) £0.01, get to the buy screen on the other account, solve the captcha, fill in the amount you will sell and then sell and buy in such quick succession that nobody else has a chance. My 'alerter' often flags up loans which it sees as available but in the time it takes to load the 'buy' page, the loan is already fully funded again.
I think that there are enough 'players' of the SM to snap up anything good pretty damn fast.
I certainly enjoy playing on the SM to try and diversify and move from shorter to longer term loans. Yes: a whole load of frustration, captchas and failures to be the FFF winner, but the occasional success always feels good... then what to sell to pay for it? How fast will it sell? Usually PDQ.
Scripts like yours 0risk make it possible to do other stuff while playing, letting the computer handle the drudgery of waiting for the good stuff while we do something useful. That's one of the things we invented them for.
Of course, I'm always off making the coffee when the good stuff pops up for all of 3.7 seconds! I return to find a great loan turned up... and I missed it again.
Anyway, getting back to the point: I disagree. I don't think there are bots buying.
Sorry to ramble... in an airport lounge with nothing better to do!
P.S. Crossed with SteveT above and completely agree with his comment.
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0risk
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Post by 0risk on Nov 17, 2016 19:29:02 GMT
twoheads, SteveT One technique discussed somewhere in this forum consists in one filling the recaptcha and then waiting for any good loan to appear. Then, a script would change the buying page and you'd just clicked Ok. The user would have to fill the captcha every 2 minutes or so, though.
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am
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Post by am on Nov 17, 2016 19:29:11 GMT
For SS themselves, holdings consisting of many fragments of shrapnel are presumably undesirable too, as a £20,000 loan part and a £20 loan part (or even a £0.02 one) would take the same amount of space in their database and the same amount of processing power for their systems to handle... which will both become increasingly significant as their systems scale (e.g. making the monthly interest allocation run take longer and/or use more processing resources). Easily resolved. Everything in your holding counts as a single loan part, once 7 days has passed from purchase. Simple overnight batch process required to agglomerate them. Job jobbed. Perhaps 7 days and one interest payment from purchase.
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SteveT
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Post by SteveT on Nov 17, 2016 20:12:10 GMT
twoheads , SteveT One technique discussed somewhere in this forum consists in one filling the recaptcha and then waiting for any good loan to appear. Then, a script would change the buying page and you'd just clicked Ok. The user would have to fill the captcha every 2 minutes or so, though. Sure, but that's a long way from an automated buying bot that can solve Captchas.
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0risk
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Post by 0risk on Nov 17, 2016 20:21:06 GMT
twoheads , SteveT One technique discussed somewhere in this forum consists in one filling the recaptcha and then waiting for any good loan to appear. Then, a script would change the buying page and you'd just clicked Ok. The user would have to fill the captcha every 2 minutes or so, though. Sure, but that's a long way from an automated buying bot that can solve Captchas. Yes, the human solves the captcha, the bot buys it as soon as it's available. It's a human-assisted bot :-)
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mikes1531
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Post by mikes1531 on Nov 18, 2016 4:01:56 GMT
Personally, I'd also prefer (e.g.) a 10% chance of being able to grab my desired £500 chunk of a loan rather than a 100% chance of being allocated maybe £50 or less per tranche... So would I. However, I don't rate my chance in a FFF situation anywhere near 10% -- I'd put it closer to 0.001%. On that basis, I'd prefer it if all tranches went via pre-funding. Maybe that's why I like AC's automated buying process. I may only be buying little bits at a time, but I do seem to manage to get a fair amount invested. It helps that AC don't have a shrapnel issue except on their transaction statements. (I sold an AC loan part the other day and it went in hundreds of individual 7p transactions!)
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Nov 18, 2016 9:21:11 GMT
I'm really not sure I can actually vote on this poll. There isn't a choice that describes my feelings. Yes - well, not really, not 100%. No - even further away from that one. No view either way - definitely have a view. If there was a " Well, kinda, but with some reservations" choice, I'd be there. I wonder if I've actually answered this myself... I've just looked at my Pipeline page. Four of the five are set to zero PF. This is a first. I've just withdrawn money. This is also a first. Maybe I do have an answer, after all?
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Nov 18, 2016 10:02:56 GMT
For SS themselves, holdings consisting of many fragments of shrapnel are presumably undesirable too, as a £20,000 loan part and a £20 loan part (or even a £0.02 one) would take the same amount of space in their database and the same amount of processing power for their systems to handle... which will both become increasingly significant as their systems scale (e.g. making the monthly interest allocation run take longer and/or use more processing resources). Easily resolved. Everything in your holding counts as a single loan part, once 7 days has passed from purchase. Simple overnight batch process required to agglomerate them. Job jobbed. That would seem to create more problems than it solves - so many side-conditions and caveats that would need to be programmed in and/or resulting complexity in statements and loan part reports. e.g.: - do you skip over parts that are already for sale? - where do you show the pre-agglomeration parts (e.g. do they count as having been "sold" to yourself, or do you create a whole new section for them)? - does the agglomeration process use the date of agglomeration as the start date for the agglomerated part, or the date of the most recent purchase? If it uses the date of agglomeration, does that trigger a new 7 day waiting time? If it uses the date of the most recent purchase, the end date of any other loan part(s) would need to be backdated to 7 days earlier. - what should appear on the statement at the time of agglomeration? [or should statement entries from 7 days ago be modified in some manner?] - how are various potential race conditions resolved (actions the user could be taking at the exact moment that the agglomeration process is running on the same loan parts)? In addition, those whose preference is to keep the individual parts would then lose the (currently readily-available) information about how loan they've owned each individual part. An alternative would be a complete redesign of how loan parts are stored, losing the current simple structure of a loan part that has a single start and end date, a single amount and interest rate, and from which the interest can be readily calculated or checked on demand... but this complete redesign would be far from the "easily resolved" you suggest.
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Nov 18, 2016 13:22:46 GMT
Personally, I'd also prefer (e.g.) a 10% chance of being able to grab my desired £500 chunk of a loan rather than a 100% chance of being allocated maybe £50 or less per tranche... So would I. However, I don't rate my chance in a FFF situation anywhere near 10% -- I'd put it closer to 0.001%. On that basis, I'd prefer it if all tranches went via pre-funding. Maybe that's why I like AC's automated buying process. I may only be buying little bits at a time, but I do seem to manage to get a fair amount invested. It helps that AC don't have a shrapnel issue except on their transaction statements. (I sold an AC loan part the other day and it went in hundreds of individual 7p transactions!) If a large chunk is released at once, the required reaction time for FFF is much longer - in some cases when the largest amounts have been release by FFF, it's been measured in weeks! In the past there had been problems when certain "enterprising" investors believed they'd get to keep the interest on a loan part they held overnight but never paid for, and when there were no limits on how big a chunk could be acquired via the INPL system, so it wasn't uncommon to see even a 6 figure sum disappear in an instant (and re-appear a day or two later when it hadn't been paid for, or when the investor was playing "pass the parcel" between multiple accounts). Those problems no longer seem to exist, and the investor activity log for DFL007 shows that quite a lot of people managed to get a chunk, with no obvious "I'll just take the lot, thanks" from a really deep-pocketed investor... the main requirement would have been to be online and logged in with the loan parts page loaded at the moment they became available (or within however many seconds/minutes it took to clear - I was't there, so don't know)... even if it sold so quickly that your conditional probability of being able to pick up a piece given that you're already logged in and ready to buy a part at the exact moment the new tranche went live was as little as 10%, 0.001% overall chance would imply you were spending no more than 0.01% of the time even logged on and ready to buy stuff - equivalent to about 1 minute per week. I assume you were exaggerating for effect... However, my 10% was also intended to reflect future buying opportunities - now that there are some large loan parts in circulation, some of which may have been created specifically for the purpose of having something liquid to sell during the next glut, there's a non-negligible chance of picking one up when it's resold... as well as any future opportunities that may occur when further tranches are added. When essentially all of the loan parts were small due to the bottom-up allocation, the chance of EVER getting a single large loan part was essentially zero. If the deficiencies of the current pre-funding system could be resolved (e.g. taking existing and/or rolled-over holdings into account, so that investors who use auto pre-funding don't end up with multiple times their intended amount in one loan), I'd be fairly ambivalent (the minor preference for being able to get a single £500 part more easily would probably cancel out with the minor preference for not having to camp out on the available loans page any more than absolutely necessary), but because of the extra problems caused by the current pre-funding system when used for subsequent tranches of an existing loan, I'd personally prefer it not be used for that. AC's system seems to have plenty enough of its own problems (e.g. extremely poor liquidity in some loans, whilst others remain unavailable at all for weeks on end - not even tiny allocations of shrapnel...), as well as the problems you acknowledge with shrapnel on the statement (making it very difficult to cross-check the statements - something very easy at SS, where each statement entry is tagged with the specific loan part it applies to, and each loan part has a very simple calculation for its interest).
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ablender
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Post by ablender on Nov 18, 2016 17:19:33 GMT
What I find problematic with releasing extra loan extensions without announcing them is that I cannot tell if someone is selling, perhaps because they might know information about the loan that alarmed them or if SS is dumping the extension on the SM. I am always careful when large numbers appear suddenly on the SM.
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ablender
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Post by ablender on Nov 18, 2016 17:24:43 GMT
Sure, but that's a long way from an automated buying bot that can solve Captchas. Yes, the human solves the captcha, the bot buys it as soon as it's available. It's a human-assisted bot :-) Is it a human-assisted bot or a bot-assisted human?
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toffeeboy
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Post by toffeeboy on Nov 22, 2016 14:20:33 GMT
Yes, the human solves the captcha, the bot buys it as soon as it's available. It's a human-assisted bot :-) Is it a human-assisted bot or a bot-assisted human? surely any assistance from a human stops it being a bot altogether. My understanding is that a bot doesn't need any human assistance at all so the human assistance makes it something completely different.
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ablender
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Post by ablender on Nov 22, 2016 18:57:24 GMT
Is it a human-assisted bot or a bot-assisted human? surely any assistance from a human stops it being a bot altogether. My understanding is that a bot doesn't need any human assistance at all so the human assistance makes it something completely different. What about an android?
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sl75
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Post by sl75 on Nov 23, 2016 8:25:43 GMT
Is it a human-assisted bot or a bot-assisted human? surely any assistance from a human stops it being a bot altogether. My understanding is that a bot doesn't need any human assistance at all so the human assistance makes it something completely different. If the ONLY function a human has (not even necessarily the same human who set up the bot) is to solve a captcha, this would effectively be a subroutine within the bot (e.g. "GetValidatedCaptcha(...)"), and very much a "human-assisted bot". It is then partly a question of how the bot persuades the human to comply - should be easy if the human is the one who originally set up the bot, but otherwise various offers of free downloads, or even direct offers of payment in a suitable digital currency can be effective. Amazon's "mechanical turk" is an example of how such technology can be used in a more legitimate manner (at least, I assume that a "solve this captcha to let my automated program pretend to be a human on a third party website" task would not be considered legitimate...!)
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