i gave UW support team ALL the info they needed to Stop ALL bots one and ALL with 1 single change to their system.. i also gave them the info on how to tell who is a bot and who is not with 1 single linux command line. Yes they use linux for their servers.. DID THEY DO ANYTHING WITH THIS INFO???! NO.
so, its not the bot's fault that they are closing, it has nothing to do with the bots.. they have had the power to stop them since before killbot was even released. but they have not, nor do they have any intentions of ever doing so.
bug point only has 1 reason for running a game, and that is MONEY.. the money they make from gamers is CHUMP change. the REAL money is in advertising and stock investments. the gamers money is just icing on the cake. the advertisers are not paying what they used to pay for advertisements, and the investment economy is drying up thanks to OBAMA bin'Ladin. the EU money markets are going super nova, and Germany is being taken down with it. so chances are they are liquidating all assets before EU money market tanks.
for all those programmers out there, and bot makers, consider what it would do to all of your bots if bugpoint exposed 100 different SID's and randomly placed them all over the page source. 99% of all bots need this SID in order to take over the session. some require the user to find it, and copy/paste it over to the bot, and some do it for them. but if they made it near impossible for a human to guess which SID to use, and randomized how the client chose which one to use.. then wala.. your bots are toast.
next is identification of who is bots and who is not. whenever a web browser client makes a request to a web server, along in the request is sent a "referral" url. 99% of all bots never send this along when connecting. identification of any client who connected with out a referral can easily be done with a grep on the web server access logs. or they can be identified by max session length time. if a session time goes beyond 12 hours, you can pretty much bet its a bot.
anyhow.. they have known about these things since the early days.. its not rocket science, its stupid easy stuff that ANY systems administrator would come up with.
so stop blaming the bots or the botters.. if anything blame the company or the economy.
thanks,
Cya (* [DOA]Magic *)