Never Ending Dota 2 Logunge bots

How do i prevent these scam bots from adding
I get like 8-10 bot request per day

Any help will be appreciated

p.s. i block every single bot that sends me a request but the bot request don't stop
i have blocked over 1000 bots already

They scrape the *Lounge for ppl with recent trades, and those will be attempted to hijack, scam etc. If you want the invites to stop: remove your trades there, go private, hit the various sites to make sure their most recent view of your backpack is "private" etc. and then slowly the bots will stop adding you.

If you want Lounge to improve, ask them to add preventive measurements to their site. Things to think of:
- Traders ID's only visible for logged on users
- Require that interaction is done on daily base on the site to view more then x trades (posting trades, posting comments etc) and whatever will make them be more "human"
- Adding captcha's
- Requiring to have the game.
- Required to have at least x games.
- Requiring to have actual items
- requiring to have actually played the game for x hours
Etc

Making life difficult for its users, and then the balancing of what can be done against scraping and still leave the real users use the site without too much hindrance.

Ofcourse, then bots will be made/changed that do this automatically. And then the battle can begin: inhuman scraping of the site resulting in bans (which they will adapt with slowing down the scraping, using more scraper bots, etc).

Its all a trade-off: easy to use site with a lot of bots being annoying to its users, or a more difficult site with a bit less bots.

Honestly, it shouldn't be up to lounge to stop these bots, I think Valve has fallen a little short. Bot runners will always find a way to get people's steamids no matter what 3rd party websites do. Unless the botters have thousands of new accounts made each day that only add a handful of people each, Valve should be able to easily detect them.

Except all it takes is to not allow new accounts to add more than 1-2 friends a day, and instead only allow other people to add them. If you actually know someone in real life, that should cause zero problems to actual users.

That said, it seemed like they were doing quite well at stopping them until a week or two ago.

I'm also surprised the bot makers are so simple right now. If they detected when someone blocks their bot, and then reduced sending bot requests to that person, they could send more bot requests to potentially vulnerable people without wasting detection-inducing adds on people who just block them. I could also make a better account name & profile generating script in a day than what these guys use.

I also feel like the invoice scams could easily be done by a bot. Considering that those are just about finding someone who doesn't know what an invoice is, and requires zero convincing of rep, a bot could probably get it done in 90% of the cases where a human could have.

Thanks for the info
Greatly appreciated

Hmm, yes and no.. by making the site less nuisance for its (real) users, it improves the site's usability etc. And all Valve bans are manual (altho they may use scripts to do multiple/many, its still a employee that presses/clicks a button).

Interesting. I assumed they had an automated system in place to deal with spam bots. I guess that's why they added the $5 of games requirement, so that their bans could start having some impact. Most other major sites have some pretty advanced automatic banning systems.

things that are non-ambiguous are automated by them (chargebacks to steam etc). Not that that improves quality for their manual bans...

How much stuff do you post on trading sites? All the bots nowadays add whenever something gets bumped on one of them.