NO MORE REaptcha on giveaways [PLEASE READ]

[RiciRickMOD]

Hi Wonderful Indiegala public!

As many of you noted the giveaway section received a substantial change in requiring to solve recaptcha to enter a single giveaway.

Unfortunately for the sake of few users who abused this system with bots and thousands of simultaneous requests, all the other honest users resented this with a very heavy navigation. Now with this as you can see the situation, performance side is improved in ga section.
So, in a nutshell, this change was made with the sole aim of ensuring a better usability of the section.

Nevertheless, we note that this change has left many of you unhappy, so we read all the suggestions you proposed and we came with something
quick to implement. We still don't know if this will be the optimal solution but as always we will see, and we will listen to you.

EDIT:

During the weekend we decided to stay in office working on performance and other issues and figured out several ways to prevent bot abuses so again
Now CAPTCHA is TOTALLY DISABLED FOR everyone.

We are also studying a long term solution to allow also good users with no purchases on indiegala.com, looking also at your suggestions ( eg: steam level > 0 ) or forbid ga entry if game already in library , but these solutions require more time and we will implement it in the next days.
We will monitor the situation over the weekend, as usual let us know your feedback.

As always, we accept your suggestions, we do not write often here but I guarantee that we read all your posts.

Thank you!

 

[RiciRickMOD]

During the weekend we decided to stay in office working on performance and other issues and figured out several ways to prevent bot abuses so again
Now CAPTCHA is TOTALLY DISABLED FOR everyone.

We are also studying a long term solution to allow also good users with no purchases on indiegala.com, looking also at your suggestions ( eg: steam level > 0 ) or forbid ga entry if game already in library , but these solutions require more time and we will implement it in the next days.
We will monitor the situation over the weekend, as usual let us know your feedback.

As always, we accept your suggestions, we do not write often here but I guarantee that we read all your posts.

Thank you!

 

[XJ9]

Thank god

 

[Deror]

@RiciRick

My tips:

1) set an option for hide the games already in the steam library so we avoid every time for open each ga and check if we have the game or not ( i have 500+games so hard to remember all)
2) set an option for hide dlc when we missing the basegame (same reaons)
3) something for filter lvl 0 steam accounts or anyway fake ga/fake users/double,triple,quadra accounts

have a nice day, ciao

 

[NightStrike StrikeNight]

forbid ga entry if game already in library

Please don't do this. There's nothing wrong with winning a key for a game you already own. Maybe you want to give it to someone else?

 

[OwO]

steam lv 0 is here
dont ban me T_T
i love this site

 

[Paddy]

During the weekend we decided to stay in office working on performance and other issues and figured out several ways to prevent bot abuses so again
Now CAPTCHA is TOTALLY DISABLED FOR everyone.

We are also studying a long term solution to allow also good users with no purchases on indiegala.com, looking also at your suggestions ( eg: steam level > 0 ) or forbid ga entry if game already in library , but these solutions require more time and we will implement it in the next days.
We will monitor the situation over the weekend, as usual let us know your feedback.

As always, we accept your suggestions, we do not write often here but I guarantee that we read all your posts.

Thank you!

Praise jebus! <3

 

[GoBerserk]

Sanity has returned!

Thank you for staying in on the weekend to get rid of captchas and work on this. It is very appreciated.

Originally posted by: RiciRick
or forbid ga entry if game already in library

It would make sense to not even have those giveaways show up then.

Something else that might be good to hide would be DLCs for games that aren't owned. Or at least an option to hide them. There's been a few times I've accidentally entered DLC for something I didn't own because I wanted the game and wasn't paying enough attention. That was my fault but then there was no way to leave the giveaway once entered. I never won one of those thankfully but it would be nice to have a way to leave a giveaway.

 

[Nirantali]

Thanks for removing those infuriating captchas and revrting back to like it was before.

The site still isn't the fastest and there probably is a problem with concurrency because the Error still show up,
but at least they don't bother too much now and they are easy to circumvent by going some pages back and retry.

If concurrency is enhanced and some of the suggestions (hide DLCs for which basegame isn't owned, hide games already owned etc.)
are implemented it will become even more convenient.

Thanks and have a nice sunday!

 

[*****gamer2014]

Anyone else having problems accessing giveaways tonight?

 

[RedSparr0w]

Anyone else having problems accessing giveaways tonight?

Nope,
Only problem im having is that incapsula getting set off after entering too many giveaways,
Can only do about 15 per minute otherwise i get the error.

 

[NightStrike StrikeNight]

I can't get to 15.....

 

[NightStrike StrikeNight]

Ok, RiciRick, this whole limitation on how many you can enter in a time window is as usual poorly designed and poorly implemented. You obviously have a threshold server side that blocks giveaway entry if a user enters too many too quickly. But in classic lousy IG UX, you don't convey that to the user. So as a user, I have no idea that 1) there's a rate limit, 2) what the limit is, 3) whether I've exceeded it, and 4) if that even is the reason why the giveaways get denied. An unhelpful "Error, try again" message is infuriating.

And even if you did those things right, I'm going to tell you again that this is not how you optimize a server backend. You guys run this site like it's a kiddie BBS back in dialup days that you'd only turn on at 10pm after your parents go to sleep so you can use the phone line. Slowing down users will not help your broken-by-design scalability issues.

I'll try to help you understand this flawed server scaling with some math. Let's say you can currently handle 100 simultaneous GA entries per second (GPS), and you have 100 users, but each user can theoretically enter two GPS with fast clicking. So, you put in a rate limit that prevents users from entering giveaways faster than 1 GPS even if they can click faster. And if they exceed that limit, you shut off their GA entry ability for a minute or so. You consider this effective load balancing.

Now, what happens when your user base swells to 200 users? Your site is still poorly designed, so you can't scale your architecture (or you would have already). With 200 users trying to hit your site at 2 GPS, thats now 400 GPS load, 4 times your max. So now you have to cut your threshold to 0.5 GPS, worsening the overall experience for everyone because your site did well and attracted more users.

If you extend this, the better your site does, the worse the overall experience. Eventually, people won't be able to actually enter multiple giveaways at all. This does not scale.

In the modern era of web development, it's all about scale. Now, IG is a relatively small website. This should not be a difficult challenge. I built websites in the late 90s that could handle millions of db transactions per second on cheap hardware that I could afford myself. There's no excuse today in the age of cloud based on demand services. You don't need to project out your hardware costs, and overbuy in case of a heavy month. You get an AWS account (or wherever), you pay for only what you use, and you use fast, efficient web frameworks to minimize your server overhead (which is directly tied to cost) due to non-converting traffic (page views that don't result in a sale).

Your model for handling giveaways doesn't scale, plain and simple. We already know by giveaway participant count that you aren't getting millions of hits per second. And any user only has 240 credits (unless they give you more money, which means you can buy more hardware, which will either not add to the problem or reinforce my point about lacking scalability), so they can only enter at most 240 GAs per day. Why can't I send those 240 entries in one second? If I can build a site that handles millions of hits per second with PGSQL and a 1.2 GHz Xeon 15 years ago, you can surely do that today. ?My back of the envelope calculations tells me that you should be able to handle every user entering 240 giveaways in the same second. This is not unreasonable for a website in 2017. Stop trying to throttle users, and instead examine why handling the submission requests of a single user requires so much effort server side. THAT is your problem, not website abuse.

My guess is that you probably have way too many messaging exchanges between client and server, you're probably trying to hit the DB far too often instead of caching, you likely have poorly optimized indexing (this can make O(1) operations become O(n^2)), and you probably have a very custom, kludgey, patchwork backend that was never mapped out in a clean design, instead growing over time as you threw in new features, leaving you with a maintenance mess.

What language is your server side written in? I bet I can take a pretty good crack at it.

 

[RiciRickMOD]

Hi nightstrike

thank you for your clever and competent analysis.
Situation is a bit more complicated for several reasons.
But if you drop me an email ( just write to our support email asking that email be forwarded to "Riccardo" ) i'll be more than happy to speak with you about details.

 

[RedSparr0w]

I can't get to 15.....

I get 15 everytime consecutively and then it stops working for a minute.

 

[Philip]

...ric, I love this indie site. I think good as it is (Pretty much). TY my steam is at level 1 or 2 only. I don't have PayPl. or I don't Social Media- But I do IndieGala. TY,TY.TY....! Everyone hav a great day. The best I've done here in my months is that with 825 or so I, yes me, I won Sega Bundle of coy heros and total warhammers (Was actually 8 games not one)...So thank yu to all who "Giveaway- and Participate""....TY ....