This morning, people from a few different families got akilled for using an automated way to scratch. In #help, the blame was quickly put on our userscript Beyond, but on Omerta's Facebook Wall this was rectified, stating the people who got akilled merely used Beyond as a "preconceived excuse".

This makes you wonder, though, what kind of script the people used, and how the admins caught it. If it was an userscript, like Beyond itself also is, there is absolutely no way the admins could see these people had it installed, thanks to GreaseMonkey's sandbox environment and the fact that it is a client side script, not server side. This means the script is executed after Omerta has created the whole page and thus, if they want to detect such a script, they are already "too late" in the process.

Two ways of detecting scripts come to mind:

• Sending admin warnings, with those nice little red envelopes, to detect if an user who is online is really behind his computer. This is a good, solid way to detect scripting, and a way they should use more. If they used this method, however, there is no way they could deliberately say the akills were justified for using a scratching script. They could only say the users simply scripted.


• Logging the times an action is executed. This is the most logical way, and also a very good way to detect certain scripts. The logic behind it is simple: Every time a S&W card is bought or checked, save the time it was done into the database. If a player did 100+ cards with exactly the same time in between, it is clearly a script; there is no way a player could done so many cards in a row and time it perfectly. If the script that is used had no random numbers, but always executed his code on the exact same time interval, then this is the way the admins have detected it and can confidently say it was because of scripting.

Unfortunately, admins in #help still say that Beyond is the one to blame, but we are confident this will end soon after their rectification. It is true that Beyond had an automatic scratch script, in a far distant past, but DrunkenGamer talked with us about it and we immediately complied without hesitation and took it out of Beyond, and also took it out of the site. They asked us to do this because they were afraid Beyond caused the 50x errors with the massive load of requests from automatic scratching. Everything the admins say on their Facebook posts is true and we, as Beyond team, hope that the things happened today will not affect our good relation with the admins