I tried to write a little something something to detect such behavior. Sad to say my cheater detection attempt didn't work out quite as well as I hoped.
The ratings need the comments of professionals. Those are the most valuable, since they know what they are talking about. Sadly they are also the busiest and can't rate all day every day.
Suggestion:Use the itch.io server-side API to check out the state of every user on every game by using a GET Request,then process that information and store it in the mysql database and determine if it the state is not_viewed maybe set to true in the database then you can make an event maybe when somebody is commenting when not_view is set to true maybe do a POST Request to post a send a message the program caught maybe saying something along the lines of:'You cannot rate before viewing the game'
What are you doing in this dead thread?
There is no problem with the scraping itself. My c# script works perfectly fine and the database fits all the data well. The problem is the analysis itself. I hoped that the Jaccard index would be enough and create a bump in the bell curve somewhere in the lower score indicating an anomaly aka the cheaters. Unfortunately that didn't happen at all. In fact some confirmed "cheaters" scored close to the middle.
I kind of expected the algorithm to fail, since it is the barest of bones. All I got from it was a little scraping and database experience as well as a sort of inaccurate comment uniqueness rating. There is another thread about this tough.
Here's another solution:Use the itch.io server-side API to check out the state of every user on every game by using a GET Request,then process that information and store it in the mysql database and determine if it the state is not_viewed maybe set to true in the database then you can make an event maybe when somebody is commenting when not_view is set to true maybe do a POST Request to post a send a message the program caught maybe saying something along the lines of:'You cannot rate before viewing the game'
I had a look at the API, but there are a couple of problems.
As far as I am concerned the API is mostly intended to do fancy things with your own games. Quickly changing prices making an auto reply bot things like that. It is complete overkill for simple get requests.
It also requires the users to accept one thingy (I completely forgot what it's called). Long story short, I can't force this and it doesn't give me anything that I could use for my purpose.
I am unsure how I would even go about implementing your post suggestion. Write a silly comment? I don't have access to the server, I can't make a popup and lock the ratings.
Also I am new to APIs and the documentation is way too hard to read/implement. Maybe I'm just dumb again and its super useful, but my workaround is fine.
I don't know about requesting the state of every user and game constantly. Firstly it took me about half an hour to collect all data by itself, too long it would let peps slip thru (I might optimize it to make it faster, but it mostly depends on the internet connection that I can't change). Secondly I think that itch.io would kick me for attempting to dos their server
Also the automatic ranking system already nerfs suspicious ratings. They look at all the star ratings you gave and shrink their wight if they don't follow the bell curve. This means that "randomly" clicking (humans can't click randomly) on stars or review bombing in disregard of the game you will probably result in an uneven distribution, which in turn results in your ratings having zero weight in the final score. Cheating that might be more difficult than actually playing the games.
Besides this isn't really what my cheater detection was about. It's more about low effort comments copy pasted to dozens of games. That's what I wanted to detect. People that just want to get you to play their game and don't want to put in the necessary legwork.
I have a YouTube channel,if you're planning to program in other programming languages at:https://youtube.com/channel/UCqj9jELS5ayGGl8WES0x70w
