Re: Should we really care??
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Online site can't do much about the screen scrapping issues.
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Absolutely incorrect. Browsing that other forum a week or so ago, everyone's Star's bots broke because PS dropped their cards down 4 pixels on the tables. From what I understand, if a bot can't scrape it's hole cards, it sits out. Randomly repositioning cards once every <x> hands will create massive scraping headaches.
Ranges of pixels can be analyzed for pattern matching (like AHK's built-in capability) but this adds a lot of CPU overhead if every single item scraped can be repositioned randomly at random intervals. Apparently, some bots require a lot of processing power to get through all their formulas, PT calls, player betting pattern analysis, etc. Having to search ranges +/- 10 pixels in any direction will significantly increase CPU power needed.
Furthermore, many bots apparently broke recently when a site went from ASCII to Unicode text in the chat window. Better yet for the sites would be to use graphic fonts for player actions to render trailing the text window useless.
There is much that can be done to thwart scraping. It's a cat-n-mouse game, and currently there are many many effective techniques sites haven't used yet to break the scrapers.
On the downside, anti-scraping will also break the "odds calculators" that fish use. Those are allowable at most sites, and get more fish to think they "have an edge" cause they know their odds/outs/draws/nut identification.
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