What tools do you use for automation?

dchuk

dchuk

Senior Botter
Oct 30, 2008
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serpiq.com
let's get this place lively...

I would imagine most people use iMacros, uBot, or PHP/cURL for their botting endeavours, but I'm curious to know what else people are using. Libraries, classes, software, api's, etc..

I'll kick it off:

I use Ruby for most of my botting stuff, so mechanize/nokogiri and Watir are my favorites. I use mechanize when I need a lot of things running in parallel, like scraping, and I use Watir when I need to tackle either complex AJAX stuff or speed isn't an issue.

What are you guys using?
 


honestly.. macros FTW.

I used to handcode all kinds of shit in PHP back in the day with curl and etc..., however I kept running into issues with ajax/javascript on pages and using snoopy with php wasnt my thing, so I turned to macro type solutions with:

Ubot
Jitbit
WinAutomation
Automation Anywhere
iMacros
and a couple of others

I am looking back into PHP more some ( some of the botting i do is a combo of a macro + php parsing on the backend ) and actually looking at Ruby per your suggestion.
 
PHP (and lately include PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser). uBot is cool for very minor scraping jobs, but overall I just prefer to code my own stuff.

Been looking at ruby, but fuck, when do I have time to learn another language when what I'm using now works great?
 
eliquid said:
honestly.. macros FTW.

I used to handcode all kinds of shit in PHP back in the day with curl and etc..., however I kept running into issues with ajax/javascript on pages and using snoopy with php wasnt my thing, so I turned to macro type solutions with:

Ubot
Jitbit
WinAutomation
Automation Anywhere
iMacros
and a couple of others

I am looking back into PHP more some ( some of the botting i do is a combo of a macro + php parsing on the backend ) and actually looking at Ruby per your suggestion.
Click to expand...

How do you compare these different macro tools? Which ones are you using more or less? Where do you see their limitations?
 
DKPMO said:
How do you compare these different macro tools? Which ones are you using more or less? Where do you see their limitations?
Click to expand...

I use iMacros, uBot, and WinAutomation. I use uBot for anything that doesn't use flash (since uBot doesn't support flash). It's the most user friendly one to use and I find I spend a lot less time with a lot less headaches creating uBot bots.

I use iMacros for flash sites since it supports flash.

WinAutomation is terrible to use for automating online tasks IMO. So I use WinAutomation for automation that isn't online (since uBot and iMacros are limited to web browsers). For instance in this thread I had an issue with iMacros running everything on one core. So after getting advice in that thread I wrote a WinAutomation bot that automatically changes the affinity for each iMacros instance every 45 seconds.

All three are good for different things and they all have their own limitations.
 
Thanks! I have been putting off trying these browser-based tools, but seems like I have been missing out.
 
After I say I don't have time to learn a new language, what do I do? I start learning Ruby of course. Fuck you all for getting me started on it, it's a pretty interesting language.
 
DKPMO said:
How do you compare these different macro tools? Which ones are you using more or less? Where do you see their limitations?
Click to expand...

That is such a huge question I prob. cant answer it.

each tool does diff things and has its own strengths and weakness.

For example, some of them are strictly online based macros ( web browser shit ) and some are desktop based.. some can do both too, but they either do 1 better then the other.

Even within those 2 groups ( desktop or browser based ) you find some have weakness and strengths as well. For example, one of the desktop ones integrate really well with the IE api and no other desktop macro I have came across will do that.

For the online stuff, like the other guy said... Flash will determine which one of the macros I use or other variables. Each tool has something valuable to offer, but not 1 tool offers everything.
 
Urghghg. Getting MySql to work with ruby in windows is just fucking impossible.
 
PHP
Ruby (learning)
Hire software developers
Outsourcers
Ubot

most of the tasks I don't want to do myself (most of them) I outsource or create a software idea to automate and have a developer create it (from a freelance site)

if it's something simple, I will do it with Ubot

if it's something mildly complex that can be done with PHP, I will do that.. I am still learning Ruby but I know it is excellent for scraping
 
uplinked said:
hit me up on aim for debuggin' help. i haven't ran wind0ze in years, but i've worked through all them there ruby/sql problems in the past.
Click to expand...

All I know is getting MySql to work in windows is like bashing your face against the pavement. Why it doesn't just work, I have no clue.
 
I use UBot, iMacros and I just started playing with WinAutomation.

When I started, automation was all about registering accounts and posting links, but now I use it mostly to gather data and process it into some meaningful form.
 
guerilla said:
I use UBot, iMacros and I just started playing with WinAutomation.

When I started, automation was all about registering accounts and posting links, but now I use it mostly to gather data and process it into some meaningful form.
Click to expand...

Same with me. Gather data in mass and dump that shit somewhere for later use, like mysql. Then come back with some scripts and parse it out for my needs at will.
 
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