Gary Becks
Power Member
- Apr 11, 2010
- 679
- 285
I have owned Ubot Studio for the better part of it's existence (around 2 years now) and it, well it's had a rough journey to say the least.
I have probably been one of the more vocal customers when it comes to the problems it has had (mostly personal problems with the devs/forum mods). The software has definitely come a long way to say the very least though .
There's still some things to be worked out but when you consider what it takes (from a programmer's perspective) to make a piece of software like this come together they are small wrinkles in the grand scheme of things.
I have commented many times about how I felt Ubot is not really a good choice for creating commercial applications and I feel this way for a number of different reasons.
Extensibility There's a really big box you put yourself in as a programmer when using Ubot to make an app. Bottom line is that the limitations are set by the Devs of Ubot on what you need or don't need to do with the software. This is not a complaint, but it's also something that I personally just can't live with as I am always trying to add more features to an app .
Security I never got to friendly with .Net because of this to begin with but Ubot itself has no kind of license management or way to prevent cracking it or apps made with it that is very reliable. Of course this is true of any software - if you make it believe it can be cracked. I just tend to feel a bit more vulnerable with something like this though.
Bugginess This is the big one for me, bugs always just seemed to pop up out of no where with Ubot and it can be a pain in the arse trying to debug something that has no "real" debugger! :hmmmm2: I will say though - they have made great strides in this area as well.
All these things being said I have created 3 personal tools over the past couple of months with Ubot Studio that I use on a daily basis and they work flawlessly. Each one of these apps took me less than 6 Hours to make combined. In Delphi it would have most likely took me 2 days at least to do the exact same thing, maybe longer.
I spend most of my days coding in Delphi and trying to learn new programming tricks, reading books, testing code, etc.. Needless to say I don't usually have time to work on a full scale project outside of something that I am getting paid for or my main personal project.
As of late though I have been receiving pms from members about coding a bot to submit to Web 2.0 sites (Most likely because I hang around the programming section of this board a bit ? ) namely the ones listed in phpbuilt's thread here .
What's funny is the fact that I don't really think anyone who asks me about this understands what kind of a project that would be and what kind of a commitment that is to keep something of this sort updated regularly to handle site changes , spam blocking, etc..
Hell, for me to code something like this in Delphi I'd have to shell out at least $1500 in components just to get started. It's something that I am definitely not interested in doing, ( especially not for the $100 - $200 that I have been offered for the job
) as it would take up waaaay to much of my time.
This is where Ubot has an opportunity to shine and prove itself to me once and for all.! Ubot is in a league of it's own when it comes to productivity and speed of coding / getting things done. I could literally have an app like this done in Ubot within a week or two with no problems. Maintaining it would be a breeze as well if/when sites change their signup/submission process.
The problem is that I am not very optimistic about Ubot when it comes to creating something like this. I attempted it over a year ago and...,, well let's just say the bot failed miserably. It was a complete piece of shit! :irked:
After that I don't think I used Ubot again until later in 2011 when Ubot 4 was released and it was an even worse piece of shit then. It made me really glad that I had chosen to learn how to use/learn a real programming language. Nowadays though it seems that the Ubot team has afforded themselves the luxury of having some decent Devs on the team who have made the product pretty stable (as stable as something of this sort can possibly be) and added some much needed features so against my better judgment I am going to be giving this another stab.
Basically what I am going to do is attempt to create a simple little bot that creates accounts at most (if not all) of the sites listed in phpbuilt's thread, verifies emails, and submits spun content. The app will admittedly be very simple and straight forward due to the fact that I am using Ubot to make it, it won't have any database support, their will be no diagram or designer of any sort, their will be no scheduler, Ummm - you get the point - This will be no Senuke.!
I will make sure that it is multithreaded (15 20 threads), can verify emails via pop3 , supports spinning, gives the urls of where your links were posted. All the basic functionality you'd expect from such a bot.
I am mainly doing this because I want to put Ubot through the paces once and for all and see what it can do at this time since it seems to be (at least IMO) pretty stable as of today and I think I am pretty qualified to do so. Meaning any problems that occur will more than likely be with Ubot and not the noob programmer. If it succeeds then I will be the first one to give praise to the software for being able to create a semi industry standard application. This will also serve as a good review/resource thread for anyone who may be thinking of purchasing the software but is on the fence about it. If I am able to succeed in automating all or at least most of the sites in phpbuilt's thread than (considering the number of and different kinds of sites) that is a good indication that Ubot is definitely capable of meeting any IMer's needs in terms of automating simple browser based tasks with ease. If you need anything more than you should definitely consider hiring a programmer for the job or learning to program for yourself.
I will let whoever wishes to, - test/use/play with - the bot for free while I create it, if it turns out to be a winner and works well I will most likely create a BST and sell it for a really cheap one time fee or at least something with a really cheap monthly subscription ($2-$4 per month) since this is what people seem to be looking for. It really isn't feasible in terms of me (or any other dev) creating/selling/supporting such an app without a costly monthly subscription when considering the development costs/time investment involved so in this case Ubot may be the perfect solution to making something cheap for people who want to create links on Web 2.0 sites but can't afford Senuke.
Like I said, with Ubot this can be a fun little side project that doesn't really take up much of my time and doesn't require a huge commitment in terms of updates. I honestly can't honestly say whether I expect this to work or not, which is why I am documenting it here. I will keep track of and report things that Ubot has problems with ( and report any issues to the Ubot support staff ) , from what I have seen though with my simple little apps the probability for success is a lot higher than what I think it used to be - so we'll see how it goes!
Why Ubot and not Zennoposter ? I originally considered doing this project in Zennoposter and then sharing the template so people could just edit/fix it themselves when needed (which I still may do at a later date as having a thread for both could serve as a good comparison between the two ) but at the end of the day I just think Ubot has come a long way and deserves to shine on this one if it works. Not to mention the fact that using Zenno would limit the amount of people who can use the app since they would have to own Zenno in order to use it. Ubot also has much better Ajax support, (though there are ways around such things in Zenno as well) so aside from me just wanting to use Ubot right now instead of Zenno it's actually just a better fit as it stands.
Disclaimer :
I am NOT making any promises on when (or if ? :joke: ) I will finish this app or how long it will take , though I don't suspect it to take long - I have other (more important) things going on ( a hot new GF! Lol! ) so please do me a favor and don't pm me about this app in any way... I will post download links of the latest builds in this thread for users to download freely and any suggestions , bugs reports , comments can be posted here as well.
Regards..
I have probably been one of the more vocal customers when it comes to the problems it has had (mostly personal problems with the devs/forum mods). The software has definitely come a long way to say the very least though .
There's still some things to be worked out but when you consider what it takes (from a programmer's perspective) to make a piece of software like this come together they are small wrinkles in the grand scheme of things.
I have commented many times about how I felt Ubot is not really a good choice for creating commercial applications and I feel this way for a number of different reasons.
Extensibility There's a really big box you put yourself in as a programmer when using Ubot to make an app. Bottom line is that the limitations are set by the Devs of Ubot on what you need or don't need to do with the software. This is not a complaint, but it's also something that I personally just can't live with as I am always trying to add more features to an app .
Security I never got to friendly with .Net because of this to begin with but Ubot itself has no kind of license management or way to prevent cracking it or apps made with it that is very reliable. Of course this is true of any software - if you make it believe it can be cracked. I just tend to feel a bit more vulnerable with something like this though.
Bugginess This is the big one for me, bugs always just seemed to pop up out of no where with Ubot and it can be a pain in the arse trying to debug something that has no "real" debugger! :hmmmm2: I will say though - they have made great strides in this area as well.
All these things being said I have created 3 personal tools over the past couple of months with Ubot Studio that I use on a daily basis and they work flawlessly. Each one of these apps took me less than 6 Hours to make combined. In Delphi it would have most likely took me 2 days at least to do the exact same thing, maybe longer.
I spend most of my days coding in Delphi and trying to learn new programming tricks, reading books, testing code, etc.. Needless to say I don't usually have time to work on a full scale project outside of something that I am getting paid for or my main personal project.
As of late though I have been receiving pms from members about coding a bot to submit to Web 2.0 sites (Most likely because I hang around the programming section of this board a bit ? ) namely the ones listed in phpbuilt's thread here .
What's funny is the fact that I don't really think anyone who asks me about this understands what kind of a project that would be and what kind of a commitment that is to keep something of this sort updated regularly to handle site changes , spam blocking, etc..
Hell, for me to code something like this in Delphi I'd have to shell out at least $1500 in components just to get started. It's something that I am definitely not interested in doing, ( especially not for the $100 - $200 that I have been offered for the job
) as it would take up waaaay to much of my time.This is where Ubot has an opportunity to shine and prove itself to me once and for all.! Ubot is in a league of it's own when it comes to productivity and speed of coding / getting things done. I could literally have an app like this done in Ubot within a week or two with no problems. Maintaining it would be a breeze as well if/when sites change their signup/submission process.
The problem is that I am not very optimistic about Ubot when it comes to creating something like this. I attempted it over a year ago and...,, well let's just say the bot failed miserably. It was a complete piece of shit! :irked:
After that I don't think I used Ubot again until later in 2011 when Ubot 4 was released and it was an even worse piece of shit then.
It made me really glad that I had chosen to learn how to use/learn a real programming language. Nowadays though it seems that the Ubot team has afforded themselves the luxury of having some decent Devs on the team who have made the product pretty stable (as stable as something of this sort can possibly be) and added some much needed features so against my better judgment I am going to be giving this another stab.Basically what I am going to do is attempt to create a simple little bot that creates accounts at most (if not all) of the sites listed in phpbuilt's thread, verifies emails, and submits spun content. The app will admittedly be very simple and straight forward due to the fact that I am using Ubot to make it, it won't have any database support, their will be no diagram or designer of any sort, their will be no scheduler, Ummm - you get the point - This will be no Senuke.!
I will make sure that it is multithreaded (15 20 threads), can verify emails via pop3 , supports spinning, gives the urls of where your links were posted. All the basic functionality you'd expect from such a bot.
I am mainly doing this because I want to put Ubot through the paces once and for all and see what it can do at this time since it seems to be (at least IMO) pretty stable as of today and I think I am pretty qualified to do so. Meaning any problems that occur will more than likely be with Ubot and not the noob programmer. If it succeeds then I will be the first one to give praise to the software for being able to create a semi industry standard application. This will also serve as a good review/resource thread for anyone who may be thinking of purchasing the software but is on the fence about it. If I am able to succeed in automating all or at least most of the sites in phpbuilt's thread than (considering the number of and different kinds of sites) that is a good indication that Ubot is definitely capable of meeting any IMer's needs in terms of automating simple browser based tasks with ease. If you need anything more than you should definitely consider hiring a programmer for the job or learning to program for yourself.
I will let whoever wishes to, - test/use/play with - the bot for free while I create it, if it turns out to be a winner and works well I will most likely create a BST and sell it for a really cheap one time fee or at least something with a really cheap monthly subscription ($2-$4 per month) since this is what people seem to be looking for. It really isn't feasible in terms of me (or any other dev) creating/selling/supporting such an app without a costly monthly subscription when considering the development costs/time investment involved so in this case Ubot may be the perfect solution to making something cheap for people who want to create links on Web 2.0 sites but can't afford Senuke.
Like I said, with Ubot this can be a fun little side project that doesn't really take up much of my time and doesn't require a huge commitment in terms of updates. I honestly can't honestly say whether I expect this to work or not, which is why I am documenting it here. I will keep track of and report things that Ubot has problems with ( and report any issues to the Ubot support staff ) , from what I have seen though with my simple little apps the probability for success is a lot higher than what I think it used to be - so we'll see how it goes!
Why Ubot and not Zennoposter ? I originally considered doing this project in Zennoposter and then sharing the template so people could just edit/fix it themselves when needed (which I still may do at a later date as having a thread for both could serve as a good comparison between the two ) but at the end of the day I just think Ubot has come a long way and deserves to shine on this one if it works. Not to mention the fact that using Zenno would limit the amount of people who can use the app since they would have to own Zenno in order to use it. Ubot also has much better Ajax support, (though there are ways around such things in Zenno as well) so aside from me just wanting to use Ubot right now instead of Zenno it's actually just a better fit as it stands.
Disclaimer :
I am NOT making any promises on when (or if ? :joke: ) I will finish this app or how long it will take , though I don't suspect it to take long - I have other (more important) things going on ( a hot new GF! Lol!
) so please do me a favor and don't pm me about this app in any way... I will post download links of the latest builds in this thread for users to download freely and any suggestions , bugs reports , comments can be posted here as well.Regards..
