Web automation project

[oomocks]

Hi guys, I'm looking for someone to help (paid work of course) with a web automation project. It involves anti-fingerprinting elements and logging into accounts on a specific website. I've hired a number of different coders over the last couple of years from sites such as Upwork, Freelancer, etc, but been led down the garden path a few times and didn't get what I really wanted. The target site just changed their internal system so I'm back at square one again. I have some existing code from the last guy programmed in Node JS and Puppeteer. Does anyone on here have knowledge of these and interested in this? I can send more specifics for anyone who feels they may be up to the challenge. I really don't want to go back to those hiring sites again after so many recent nightmares, and randomly thought of the YakYak community so figured I'd mention it on here first.

Many thanks in advance.

[gilesgoat]

Hi not really my field but just curious, I dare to say "your job description seems extremely vague to me", I mean "what is that you want ?" "Be able to log in to a certain site(s) without being tracked ?" .. I have a friend that until confirmation may be "between jobs" an is "a web coding expert" ..

( I mean she's waiting to be re-confirmed a contract )

[KlaxonCow]

Yes, I'm worried that the job description is not only vague, but possibly deliberately vague... as why would you want to automate logging into specific websites, whilst defeating their fingerprinting methods?

That is, you'd want to automate if you want to login to tons and tons of accounts - you automate when you want to do large batches of things unsupervised - and you'd want to avoid fingerprinting methods to defeat their anti-spam measures, perhaps?

Like, the more sophisticated modern spam-bots that generate random names from "baby name" lists and then pluck their avatar from "This Person Does Not Exist":

https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en

(Yeah, you can keep hitting refresh on that site and it'll give you another AI-generated face. Except for the odd quirk, as the AI can mess up a bit with earlobes and things sometimes I've noticed, it's completely convincing.)

Then you have the spam-bot actually steal real human comments from one posting and post it elsewhere (seen this one on YouTube recently - legitimate comments but, like, just copied randomly from other videos, where the context makes zero sense to any human being, but it would fool an AI), just to make its "activity" look more believable - at least to another AI that's trying to detect spam accounts, by looking for a profile that's not behaving as a human would - before it then blasts its spam all over the place.

Like, is this a job posting for coding up a Facebook / YouTube spam-bot, basically? And the job description is purposefully vague, as you can't exactly say that out loud?

Sorry to be blunt and to the point. But, well, you know, I've never been one to suffer bullshit gladly.

[WiteWulf]

Agreed, sounds dodgy as hell
/my two penneth

[oomocks]

It's monitoring data about book buying / popularity. I don't want to say too much online as revealing specific monitoring patterns could affect how certain sites behave, thus nullifying the purpose of what I'm doing. This information gives indie authors the possibility to compete, on a small scale, against the insane might of certain sites I'm sure we all shop on, and their ability to decide what is popular and what is not.

It was just a thought to check on here as I knew lots of you guys were coders. I've been down a number of roads in the last couple of years recruiting for certain coding projects on sites such as Freelancer, Upwork, etc, but overwhelmingly the resulting code purchased doesn't live up to promises. The very nature of those sites mean that you have to pay in entirety before receiving the code. You get to see a video of it running, but the reality generally falls woefully short of what was promised.

Not to worry, I'll keep looking around. Thanks for your time anyway, guys.

[Misfit]

Not to worry, I'll keep looking around. Thanks for your time anyway, guys.

I don't think anyone has a problem helping if they have the skills. Just your initial enquiry made it sound dodgy!

How is the writing going? I enjoyed your first couple of books, but you've not been back highlighting them if you've done more. Not that I have much time to read these days

[oomocks]

Hi Misfit. I did work on a third book for about five or six years, but then the marketing side of the industry took over and I've spent most of my time in that area since. I also have a Ukrainian wife now too and spent most of the last couple of years in Irpin just outside Kyiv, so I'm sure you can imagine that's been somewhat problematic and we got out only a week before the invasion began.

Life does like to keep throwing up challenges.

[KlaxonCow]

Just your initial enquiry made it sound dodgy!

This.

When you leave the description so vague, our imaginations fill the gaps and, well, in this case, it painted a picture that sounded right dodgy.

But I'm happy to hear that it's not.