luckyluke.rb - Voting Bot - Recommended Update

This update handles issues involving two frontrunner exploits. One has to do with two bids being cast in two windows, where one bid is small, which is typically ignored by frontrunners, followed by a second bid is larger, but returned. Lucky Luke now ignores the second bid.

The second exploit is a timing attack that takes advantage of voting windows that accept a bid right before the 12-hour lockout. This is handled by ignoring bids that are a day away from payout (or different timeframes, if configured as such).

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Lucky Luke is a reimplementation of Dr. Phil, but instead of voting for new articles, it votes for posts mentioned in the memo field of a transfer operation. By default, it votes for any transfer sent to booster but you can configure any bot that receives pay-for-vote transfers. You can also set a minimum transfer amount to ignore small amounts.

New Features

• max_transfer allows you to specify the maximum amount in the transfer to vote on, which is useful when running multiple instances with voting tiers.
• max_age allows you to only upvote newer content, for example, avoiding posts that are about to become locked.

Features

• YAML config.
  • voting_rules
    • min_transfer allows you to specify the minimum amount in the transfer to vote on.
    • min_wait and max_wait (in minutes) so that you can fine-tune voting delay.
    • enable_comments option to vote for post replies (default false).
    • max_rep option, useful for limiting votes to newer authors (default 99.9).
    • vote_signals account list.
      • Optionally allows multiple bot instances to cooperate by avoiding vote swarms.
      • If enabled, this feature allows cooperation without sharing keys.
    • min_rep can now accept either a static reputation or a dynamic property.
      • Existing static reputation still supported, e.g.: 25.0
      • Dynamic reputation, e.g.: dynamic:100. This will occasionally query the top 100 trending posts and use the minimum author reputation.
      • Checking vote_weight: 0.00 % and skipping without broadcast.
        • This is useful for special configurations that only vote for favorites.
      • min_voting_power to create a floor with will allow the voter to recharge over time without having to stop the script.
    • only_tags (optional) which only votes on posts that include these tags.
    • Optionally configure voters as a separate filename. E.g:
      • voters: voters.txt
        • The format for the file is just: account wif (no leading dash, separated by space)
      • Or continue to use the previous format.
    • Also optional support for separate files in each (format one per line or separated by space or both):
      • skip_accounts
      • skip_tags
      • flag_signals
      • vote_signals
• bots is a list of bots to watch transfer operations for.
• Skip posts with declined payout.
• Skip posts that already have votes from external scripts and posts that were edited.
• Argument called replay: allows a replay of n blocks allowing you to catch up to the present.
  • E.g.: ruby luckyluke.rb replay:90 will replay the last 90 blocks (about 4.5 minutes).
• Thread management
  • Counter displayed so you know what kind of impact ^C will have.
  • This also keeps the number of threads down when authors edit before Lucky Luke votes.
• Streaming on Last Irreversible Block Number, just to be fancy.
• Checking for new HF18 cashout_time value (if present).
  • This will skip voting when authors edit their old archived posts.

Overview

The goal is to vote before the pay-for-vote bot. To achieve this, Lucky Luke watches for transfer operations.

You might configure the bot to only watch for transfers over 10.000 SBD, for example. The bot will also use a few other rules like to avoid voting for declined payouts and automatically suspend voting if it needs to recharge.

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Install

To use this Radiator bot:

Linux

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ruby-full git openssl libssl1.0.0 libssl-dev
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ gem install bundler

macOS

$ gem install bundler

You can try the system version of ruby, but if you have issues with that, use this how-to, and come back to this installation at Step 4:

I've tested it on various versions of ruby. The oldest one I got it to work was:

ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299) [x86_64-darwin14.4.0]

Setup

First, clone this gist and install the dependencies:

$ git clone https://gist.github.com/07cfb044f625beb22724371b85cea0e4.git luckyluke
$ cd luckyluke
$ bundle install

Then run it:

$ ruby luckyluke.rb

Lucky Luke will now do it's thing. Check here to see an updated version of this bot:

https://gist.github.com/inertia186/07cfb044f625beb22724371b85cea0e4

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Upgrade

Typically, you can upgrade to the latest version by this command, from the original directory you cloned into:

$ git pull

Usually, this works fine as long as you haven't modified anything. If you get an error, try this:

$ git stash --all
$ git pull --rebase
$ git stash pop

If you're still having problems, I suggest starting a new clone.

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Troubleshooting

Problem: What does this error mean?

luckyluke.yml:1: syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting end-of-input

Solution: You ran ruby luckyluke.yml but you should run ruby luckyluke.rb.

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Problem: Everything looks ok, but every time Lucky Luke tries to vote, I get this error:

Unable to vote with <account>.  Invalid version

Solution: You're trying to vote with an invalid key.

Make sure the .yml file voter items have the account name, followed by a space, followed by the account's WIF posting key. Also make sure you have removed the example accounts (social and bad.account are just for testing).

Problem: The node I'm using is down.

Is there a list of nodes?

Solution: Yes, special thanks to @ripplerm.

https://ripplerm.github.io/steem-servers/

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See my previous Ruby How To posts in: #radiator #ruby

Get in touch!

If you're using Lucky Luke, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line and tell me what you think! I'm @inertia on STEEM and SteemSpeak.

License

I don't believe in intellectual "property". If you do, consider Lucky Luke as licensed under a Creative Commons License.