In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about the PS5 bot debacle, and how they would do it differently!

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Show Notes 03:12 - Scott’s strategy

• Go to Reddit and refresh until someone posts a link and then GO GO GO
• Don’t buy on sites that allow simple bots to work
• TBH I don’t know how to code this type of bot and would prob end up accidentally buying a ton of stuff

05:06 - Wes’ strategy

• https://mcbroken.com/

• You need a way to find out of there is stock

  • Find out of there is an API endpoint you can hit (inspect element)
• If there is not, you’ll need to scrape the site.
• Fetch(url). text()
• Regex
• Cheerio
• Puppeteer (slower, easier to run)
• Save any data that you want in a database. Text-based database is great.
  • Lowdb
  • SQLite
  • DynamoDB (if doing serverless)
• Re-run the scrape every N mins
• When there IS a match you can:
  • Send a text message - Twilio
  • Send an email - Postmark
  • Try to fill out the form and submit it yourself
    • document.querySelector()

11:35 - Things that get in the way

• Blocked IP
  • Use a VPN
• Captcha or Cloudflare
• Run it on your local computer
• Use Puppeteer to get all cookies and headers

Links * https://twitter.com/bahamagician/status/1329430249151533066 * stocktrack.ca

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