Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?

[BluffTHIS!]

grader,

Thanks for the reply again. If there is no way to stop scraping, then the only way to combat the bots seems to be to try to fool their inputs as mentioned in my first post, *if* there are relatively easy ways to do that. Even if it took a weekly mini-update on the part of the sites changing graphics, it would seem there is some way, but perhaps not.


dave,

No I never programmed GUI apps at all, let alone manually in C. I am older (40s) than most of you guys here. As a clue, my first programming was via punch cards in COBOL and Fortran. I got into PCs in the early 80s and programmed in Pascal, C, Basic and some assembler (hated that). I do read things on programming theory occasionally and have screwed around with java a little as well as of course HTML, but that's about it for the past 15 years.