In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about the PS5 bot debacle, and how they would do it differently!
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Show Notes
03:12 - Scott’s strategy
- Go to Reddit and refresh until someone posts a link and then GO GO GO
- Don’t buy on sites that allow simple bots to work
- TBH I don’t know how to code this type of bot and would prob end up accidentally buying a ton of stuff
05:06 - Wes’ strategy
- You need a way to find out of there is stock
- Find out of there is an API endpoint you can hit (inspect element)
- If there is not, you’ll need to scrape the site.
- Fetch(url). text()
- Regex
- Cheerio
- Puppeteer (slower, easier to run)
- Save any data that you want in a database. Text-based database is great.
- Re-run the scrape every N mins
- When there IS a match you can:
- Send a text message - Twilio
- Send an email - Postmark
- Try to fill out the form and submit it yourself
11:35 - Things that get in the way
- Blocked IP
- Captcha or Cloudflare
- Run it on your local computer
- Use Puppeteer to get all cookies and headers
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