Happy cakeday.
Also fyi .. obscuring links like this is actually is still trivial for bots to scrape. so effectively no impact to most bots while adding more work for plain ol' humans. As it stands currently, only your agatha-christie-the-abc-murders link would actually be difficult for most bots.
Using regex, a bot author could use a simple matching pattern that just looks for 5-character alphanumber codes (as a link or not) and then inserts that into their own pre-constructed giveaway link template. I do not do this myself nor am I giving away any sort of special knowledge to bot authors (I can't image anything that is scraping a page and NOT using regex TBH. So it would not be anything they don't already know).
do what you will, but if you truly wish to obscure things for bots, then a better approach would be to either a) somehow incorporate a fake 5-character alphanumeric pattern in the link or b) to add a prefix to the pattern to mess up the bots: e.g.
steamgifts.com/fAk31/gib/r3AL1wherefAk31is the fake code andr3AL1is the real one. this would probably mess up some bots but is not as effective as the next bullet.steamgifts.com/gib/someprefixR3aL1whereR3aL1is the real code. Important to note thatsomeprefixandR3aL1are not separated by non-alphanumerics such as underscore, hyphen, space, etc which would make it easy to pattern match. This is basically what your agatha-christie-the-abc-murders link is doing and why it is effective.
That still wouldn't make it completely bulletproof but would at least force bot authors to expend a lot more energy to fix their scripts / write more comprehensive checks (i have worked with professional programmers that I don't think would be up to the task of handling it in code lol)
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Woah, thank you! I was wondering if anybody would reply to that indirect question I had. Finally I have an answer to this question. Really, thank you so much! I was always wondering if this was any good.
I will remove them obstacles now.
And give you my heart for that effort you were making <3
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Happy cakeday eeeeeeeeeeev! :)
I'm going with a moody image... this guy did great stuff with pixelart back in the day.
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I love it! These pixelart images always seem like so much work to me o.0
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Happy cake day, eeev. I hope you've been well. ^_^
Have some mood for each year you've graced us with.
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Omg, those are รผber-awesome. Perfect! Just THE mood that I'm in. Although it's one too few. It's been six years now. Unbelievable, isn't it?
Thanks, old comrade <3
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Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeev! Happy cakeday :) Chin up :)
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=ออออ( ใฃ'ฮ')โฎ =ออออ๐ฐ
Happy Cake Dayโช
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Lovely people of Steamgifts,
another year has passed. I haven't celebrated my cakeday in quite a while and to be perfectly honest this year doesn't feel much like celebrating either with all that crap going on on a global level. But let's not ruin the mood.
Not gonna bore you all with too much text, so let's go straight to the giveaways. CAKEDAY!!
Lvl 2: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/UsNNOBOTH4/doom-in-the-dark-2
Lvl 3: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/sArEFRU4REAL/bomb-royale
Lvl 4: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/XcfHUMANSONLYHm/agatha-christie-the-abc-murders
Lvl 5: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/NEIMEANITY9k/arma-cold-war-assault
Lvl 6: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/cNOBOTZIiN/cryofall
Lvl 7: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/UHx7T/crazy-machines-3
Lvl 8: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/yelN0/dawn-of-a-soul
Here's some mood music.
I'd appreciate moody artsy pictures in the comments like the one below, or cat gifs, or something heartwarming instead of the usual cakes :)
Take care and thanks for all the fish <3
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