Hi internet. Lucca here.
Some really weird things happened last Friday, August 6th, which some of you may have noticed, and some new information has come to light which significantly impacts RedstoneBot’s future.
TL;DR: I have decided to officially shut down RedstoneBot.
- RedstoneBot will be still be available for up to 1 week as of writing this. The official shutdown will happen no later than Saturday, August 14th.
- All development on RedstoneBot will be ceased, effective immediately, and RedstoneBot’s GitHub repo will be archived soon.
- Following the shutdown, RedstoneBot’s database will be purged to protect its users’ privacy.
Feel free to continue reading for an in-depth explanation.
What happened?
Yesterday, Erik Groh, owner, lead developer and chief manager at PloudOS.com, issued a 30-day ban to RedstoneBot and all users who had given RedstoneBot access to their PloudOS server (including myself) over alleged violations of the PloudOS.com rules.
This decision was quite shocking, as Erik and his team were already aware of the bot’s existence and its active development since late January of 2021. Furthermore, at the time of the ban, RedstoneBot and its users were not breaking any of PloudOS.com’s rules/terms of service, thus making the ban an unfair decision on Erik’s part.
And for those of you who aren’t aware, RedstoneBot is also Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed under GNU GPL v3.0, meaning that anyone can inspect the bot’s source code to identify malicious activity or abusive behavior.
Am I still banned from PloudOS?!
No. I have contacted Erik and he agreed to unban RedstoneBot and all of its users, so you should still be able to use PloudOS normally. If you are still banned for using RedstoneBot, please visit the PloudOS Discord and open a ticket or send a PM to Erik at Erik#5555.
If the bot has been unbanned, then why are you still shutting it down?
TL;DR: Due to conflicts of interest with PloudOS.
When I contacted Erik yesterday, he stated that bots such as RedstoneBot have two major problems:
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They can hurt PloudOS’ ad revenue (which comprises the bulk of their revenue) since RedstoneBot is a web scraper and interfaces directly with PloudOS’ internal API without viewing ads.
-
Bots are not welcome at PloudOS anymore and “negatively impact the website”. A system to prevent bot usage will be implemented soon and the rules will be updated to reflect this.
Both of the these arguments are acceptable, to a certain extent. Personally, I still have some trouble grasping with Erik’s logic, but I’ve chosen to not discuss this any further in this post and will ultimately accept his decision. I’m not going to tell anyone how to run their business.
But given that PloudOS is adopting anti-bot measures, this leaves RedstoneBot in a very vulnerable position. RedstoneBot was not created to exploit or bypass any security measures, therefore all further development on RedstoneBot will be ceased, effective immediately.
Conclusion
Thank you to all of you who have used RedstoneBot through 2021 and supported its development in one way or another. This is has been a really fun project to work on, and I learned a bunch of cool stuff along the way. If any news comes up, I’ll post it here.
That’s all I got for now. Feel free to DM me if you have any more questions. All the best!
- Lucca, ex-lead dev for RedstoneBot