SITREP 26 Sep 24

Hello

I didn’t expect to have to provide another update so soon but again a lot happened overnight.

In a recent post Danny announced that he would make “official product availability announcements”, effectively killing the stealth drops.

While I’m grateful that we’re all getting official notifications back, I’d like to address some claims made by Danny in the post and specifically how they relate to SolarMarineX.

I wish Danny didn’t throw all bots into one bag. Solar Marine is a useful bot and nothing like what he describes.

• It doesn’t cause significant traffic to the website because it doesn’t need to. I wrote the bot from scratch in the last couple of weeks because I needed it to be more efficient, reliable and customizable. The side effect of it is that it needs fewer requests to the server to know everything than a single human generates when checking the site manually. I’m sure there are some bots that are inefficient and when in high numbers may hog some resources, but Solar Marine is not like that.
• It’s well known who is behind it. The X account has a badge that says it is automated by @vega_starlight. This badge requires connection with the main account, so you can be sure it belongs to me (Vega). Does it change anything? I’m not a public person but I don’t think I’m a random community member either. Somewhere in between. But for sure Solar Marine is not owned by an anonymous actor like other bots that Danny is referring to, I guess? (I’ve never seen any notification bot I didn’t know who it belongs to, have you? Heck, I’ve never seen any that was publicly available.)
• Phishing and fake links… no comment really. Links are for convenience. Don’t click if you’re afraid, just type smartdoll.jp and navigate to the announced item yourself! Problem solved. However, you should be checking if you’re on the right website whenever you’re providing personal data or buying something. Does not matter if the link you clicked was posted by an official account or not. Official accounts can be hacked too, and bad actors can use them to exploit the trust and direct people to scam or phishing resources. Fake links can be posted on Facebook groups when someone claims to notify you about the drop. Scammers are everywhere. Use common sense.

There is more in his tweet that I’m skeptical about, like:

• The actual impact of bots on website and alleged situation that “mirrors a DDoS attack”. SmD store is behind Cloudflare that provides content distribution network around the globe for fast access whereever you are, as well as DDoS protection.
• Connection to the PayPal issues. PayPal issues were first acknowledged by Danny on Aug 1, followed by credit card payments becoming available about a week later or so. Stealth drop were announced on Aug 22, which is 3 weeks after the PayPal issue. Hard to believe these are connected.
• Tracking when products are sold out. If done properly (like Solar Marine), this requires nothing on top of tracking what was restocked as far as crawling the store is concerned.
• Dummy products being present “over the years”. Yes, products like that have always been on the website but well hidden and purely for test purposes. I’ve been using a notification bot for 3 years and it never before run into deliberate attempts to confuse it, or dummy products visible for human visitors on most visited pages. It only started happening when I made notifications public. Go figure.

I’m especially disappointed about one-sided narrative that sounds like “all drop notifications bots are bad, and all of them do all these bad things”. I think a more responsible and mature reaction would be to acknowledge that there are some bots that don’t try to steal your money and simply provide a good community service. Usual caution advised, it’s Internet after all. The way this post was phrased though… sounds to me like a personal gripe with unofficial notifications about drops, making stealth drops less efficient in hiding the restocks. DDoS and phishing scare just thrown in for a good measure. Not to mention that notification bots shouldn’t be compared to bots that automate purchases, they are completely different things.

Now, about the future.

I recommend that you follow the new account for official notifications. Maybe there will be heads-up for restocks that happen before Solar Marine notifies. It’s worth a shot. As far as I can see, notifications are limited to doll awakenings atm. Solar Marine picks up restocks for all products, like clothing. (BTW I missed two doll restocks tonight due to my mistake updating the bot, sorry about that).

If you still see value of additional info, I’m happy to have you. If not then whatever. I’m not in this for the fame and following, if anything it will earn me haters.

Solar Marine will continue to be developed and improved at my leisure (so nothing changes). Let me know if there’s something you’d like to see changed or added.

If you want to unfollow or already did because you were scared by Danny’s post, I completely understand. But you have another side of the story above to process and make an informed decision.