Hi everyone,
It happened again: Sony has banned two of my new accounts: TRACK_butterfly and TRACK_flower. It's odd though as both of these only had about 400-700 friends each, so not very much compared to other accounts that were banned in the past.
There's still one running account with approx. 1800 friends. The supporters-only-account has also not been affected since the very beginning.
If you are a patreon supporter and have not added the hidden account as friend yet, please do so.
Right now I can only guess why and how my accounts are getting banned. My main suspicion is sending lots of messages and having the messages being reported by random users.
Alternatively, Sony itself could be checking the website or the amount of messages per user that are send.
There's a ton of other possibilities and a lot of truth in between all of my possibilities, but these are the one that makes most sense to me personally.
I am currently weighing my options and how I can proceed to keep this service running without having the trouble of having banned bots all the time.
- Removing the "send message immediately" feature and make it monthly for everyone by default (except supporters)
- Removing messages altogether. The bot will still track you, but you can only see stats on the website. The bot itself will not send any messages anymore (except supporters)
- Changing to a paid only service. You can only see and add accounts by paying, either once or regularly via Patreon or other services. There could be a "invite 10 friends" option additionally
Fighting a cat & mouse game with Sony is nothing I wanted to do in the first place, it's a lose-lose situation for everybody.
Although I hate to remove messages, being one of the main features, I think that it's the best option at the moment.
I would love to hear your opinion on this too, either as a comment here, by mail [email protected] or write me on Twitter @PSTimetracker