In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about the PS5 bot debacle, and how they would do it differently!

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Show Notes

03:12 - Scott’s strategy

Go to Reddit and refresh until someone posts a link and then GO GO GO
Don’t buy on sites that allow simple bots to work
TBH I don’t know how to code this type of bot and would prob end up accidentally buying a ton of stuff

05:06 - Wes’ strategy

https://mcbroken.com/

You need a way to find out of there is stock
- Find out of there is an API endpoint you can hit (inspect element)
If there is not, you’ll need to scrape the site.
Fetch(url). text()
Regex
Cheerio
Puppeteer (slower, easier to run)
Save any data that you want in a database. Text-based database is great.
- Lowdb
- SQLite
- DynamoDB (if doing serverless)
Re-run the scrape every N mins
When there IS a match you can:
- Send a text message - Twilio
- Send an email - Postmark
- Try to fill out the form and submit it yourself
  - document.querySelector()

11:35 - Things that get in the way

Blocked IP
- Use a VPN
Captcha or Cloudflare
Run it on your local computer
Use Puppeteer to get all cookies and headers

Links

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