How to get a Linden Home using Auto Refresh Plus

[kiramanell]

3 minutes ago, seanabrady said:

"What I think this 'throttle' control hopes to accomplish, is that less ppl will be trying, "....

I don't think this change has anything to do at all with getting or not getting homes, or trying to in anyway limit the number of people trying to get homes.  I can almost guarantee this came from the infrastructure team, saying "what the heck is with all the constant traffic on this page, it's killing the web server processing all these requests". We are going to throttle all incoming traffic to 1 request per X seconds. No different really from what they did in world to limit how often a region would accept a request for the teleport when TP Hammers were killing event regions with 1000's of requests per second.

At the end of the day, the traffic to the web server is traffic, no matter how it is initiated. They cant prevent someone from using an auto-refresh tool. And this wont stop you from doing it. It just means that even if you set the refresh rate to 2 seconds the web server will only respond to your request once every X seconds, maybe that number is 4 or 5 or 10 who knows.

 

The strain on the servers is certainly an aspect. But they aren't fools at LL, of course, and knew this was going on from the get-go. And they didn't seem to mind then. Maybe it's gotten worse? Who knows. I just really think they're looking for a way stop/mitigate the frenzy. Those pages were, no doubt, designed for 'casual walk-in', where ppl would occasionally pop in and try to get a home, and not as some sort of (horribly inefficient, at that) makeshift API for an automated tool, even though Patch said they completely understand why ppl are trying so hard.

[Raevyn Addams]

7 minutes ago, kiramanell said:

And, indeed, as @PrudenceAnton said, auto-refresh isn't outright verboten now. Way I understood it, they will simply put some rate/throttle control in place. How effective this measure will be in discouraging ppl from use auto-refresh tools, remains yet to be seen, of course. But, at the very least, it's guaranteed to have less ppl try per second than before (as simply less HTTP requests will get thru per time unit).

^ This. It's allowed, users just need to allow for longer time intervals or your page will crash. How do I know? It happened to me. Repeatedly. Staggered my OS to a crawl; a glimpse into my Task Manager showed I went from 1 instance of Google running to 5 instances which I can only assume is because the page crashed, and crashed, and crashed, so new pages kept loading until I realised what was going on and closed them. Yeah. Ouch. But easily fixed!

Increasing intervals improved it markedly. I'm almost loathe to say "yes it works!" because there are those that don't want this program being used by anyone. So judge for yourself. I will say however that it appears (to some degree) to have slowed down the catch rate. Meaning in the last 7 hours I've seen maybe 2 houses, whereas last night (and using shorter Auto refresh time intervals) I saw at least 5 houses if not more and managed to even catch 1. This could simply be a matter of availability and houses are not being abandoned on days that don't precede region releases. It could just as easily be the new restrictions forcing Auto Refresh to in essence "slow down".

Take that how you will.  

[kiramanell]

13 minutes ago, seanabrady said:

At the end of the day, the traffic to the web server is traffic, no matter how it is initiated. They cant prevent someone from using an auto-refresh tool. And this wont stop you from doing it. It just means that even if you set the refresh rate to 2 seconds the web server will only respond to your request once every X seconds, maybe that number is 4 or 5 or 10 who knows.

 

You're assuming a lot. We simply don't know how they're going to implement this. Some throttle control mechanisms, for instance, will increase the 'penalty' for continually trying, aka, first lock you out for 5 seconds, then add 5 seconds to each repeated infraction (within a defined timeframe). If they'd want to, they could easily outright sabotage auto-refresh that way, believe me. As it stands, we'll simply have to wait a bit and see how it's done exactly.

[Tsah]

On 7/9/2019 at 10:38 PM, Nika Talaj said:

pull down the "Select a Theme" box and select "Bellisseria".   First of all, this is not an option - Bellisseria is not listed in the dropdown box and they do not allow you to type a theme in??

 

[Raevyn Addams]

@Tsah, if you're asking how to select Bellisseria, you cannot (it's hard to tell, but looks as though you may have replied to a quote inside a quote?) There are at present no homes available. You need to refresh the page until you see Bellisseria show up in the drop-down menu. There's no option to type, no. You must select from the options shown. And since there is a high demand for the houses in Bellisseria, and at present not enough to go around, you need to refresh the page frequently in order to see the Bellisseria option show up and then select it.

[Tsah]

Thank you - I am new at this and you post was informative, like select the name of your home then paging back.  I did that and loving it... again, thanks

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 hours ago, Leora Jacobus said:

Manually refreshing is allowed? As quickly as you can? Or just once in 5 Minutes? or in 10??

Only @Patch Linden could give us answer to that I guess.

 

2 hours ago, seanabrady said:

My guess is that they are limiting how often you can refresh the page. Whether you are clicking fast, or using something to auto refresh, it will limit how often it will accept requests from you and therefore how often the page will load. It slows everyone down equally by not having to process each request for the page, for each user each second. 

 

1 hour ago, seanabrady said:

At the end of the day, the traffic to the web server is traffic, no matter how it is initiated. They cant prevent someone from using an auto-refresh tool. And this wont stop you from doing it. It just means that even if you set the refresh rate to 2 seconds the web server will only respond to your request once every X seconds, maybe that number is 4 or 5 or 10 who knows.

 

I was able to manually refresh the page last night 15 times at a rate of a bit under once per second.  How much longer than that I might have been able to go before receiving the timeout message is a matter of anyone's guess or something for the next tester to determine. In any case, it does show that you can manually refresh pretty fast, though likely not for long periods of time, even if your finger holds up.