I have some questions before I'll buy it

[Anunymux 0]

Hey,

 

first of all I am really interessted in this ubot studio. I have .net knowledge and some java skills. The problem is that it takes too long to navigate the web just with .net. It seems to be much easier with this ubot studio. I watched some of the ubot tutorials and was quite amazed. Since I am a college student I do not earn so much money but I definately want to have this great tool. I think I will buy the standard version first.

 

My problem is that it seems a little limitted. I want to create a program which executes hidden und submits some information to a site. (Do I need the dev version for my purpose?) I did this in visual basic 6 but as I said it seems that with ubot studio I'm able to do the same in just some minutes.

 

 

 

So is it possible to run all this hidden and automatically? I do not want the user to click any button first. 

 

Best regards

 

Anunymux

[Anunymux 0]

I have more questions. Can I use ubot studio on my PC AND my laptop? Or am I restricted to one machine?

 

And is there a version which includes unlimmited updates? I do not want to receive updates 3 months. Thats too less in my opinion. Or does "3 Months FREE Updates." mean I will be still able to receive updates but I have to pay for them? If so how much is an update gonna cost?

[erussx2 6]

I have had Ubot for 2 weeks.  I have not experienced terrible support.  People here come running to help you. They might not always have the answer i am looking for but they always help right away.

[erussx2 6]

I was wondering the same thing. Can ubot work in the background, "hidden"?

[Sanjeev 46]

I was hoping Old timers would come out and say good things in Ubot's favour....  

[a2mateit 395]

Ubot has it's pro's and con's.

 

It's not all bad.  But it can be a real headache sometimes.

 

It is the best RAD (rapid application development) software on the market to date.  But it can be limited in what it can do.  There is very little that I haven't been able to automate using ubot.  It all depends on what you are wanting to accomplish.  

 

And now that it has windows commands you can automate ANYTHING that you do on the computer...

 

For small projects it is very very good.  Does it sometimes crash?  Yes.  Does it have bugs?  Yes. 

 

But like I said it works very well for small projects.  Such as signing up or submitting content to hundreds of sites.  But I have never been able to get it to cycle 1,000's of loops without it crashing. 

 

If you search around the forum you will see there are TONS of threads complaining about the browser crashing.  Which has been a constant problem from the begining that STILL HASN'T BEEN FIXED! 

 

With some .net experience I will tell you that you can make better applications with .net than ubot, but it will take you ALOT longer. 

 

As for it running "hidden" in the background.  The answer to that is no.   The best you can do with that is the "hide visibility" command, which is only included in pro and dev.  That just keeps the user from being able to see what the bot is actually doing, but you can still see the bot.

 

Overall I would say if you have alot of things you want to automate, then get it.  Try it for 30 days, and if you don't like it then request a refund.  With the 30 day refund policy you really can't lose.

 

Oh, and don't pay the full $250.  Look around and find a coupon.  They are out there.

 

Hope this helps you make your mind up about Ubot.

 

Justin

[AutomationNinja 194]

Javascript is what you will be using most of the time. You can have some commands work upon loading, but not an entire bot (so they might have to push one button). If you have the developers version you can hide what is going on in the browser and hide the navigation window as well.

 

Personally I love UBot. When there are bugs they fix them right away. Support goes way out of their way to help people which is more than I would expect from them.

 

Technology isn't always perfect and neither is UBot, but I have never regretted purchasing it. It kicks serious a$$. If I could only have one piece of software it would be UBot.

 

Most of the time the  "bugs" that people complain about are not even real bugs. Have you ever used internet explorer and had it not connect to the internet? It is things like that people say are bugs.

 

When something glitches out there are a couple of people who whine about it, but most people are too busy working on solutions.  For example if the browser gives an error message simply have an if then statement. If that error exists then start over where you left off.

[a2mateit 395]

When there are bugs they fix them right away. Support goes way out of their way to help people which is more than I would expect from them.

 

That is where I have to disagree with you.

 

I have been having the browser crashing from the begining.  What you call "whining", I call being frustrated after spending a small fortune on software that doesn't work as advertised.

 

I still have the same problem that I had over a year ago.  Awesomium crashing the browser.  It still hasn't been fixed...  Not a browser error message that can be fixed with an if then.  The browser crashes...  If it was as easy as a simple if/then, we wouldn't have numerous customers "whining" about a serious problem.

 

It got so bad I just had to purchase a different program to accomplish what I was trying to do with Ubot.  (which I now have automated using the windows commands  )

 

So I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree...

 

But back on topic, I don't regret purchasing Ubot.  It was, and still is a great investment.

[Anonym 53]

As mentioned. UBot has its pros and cons.

What "worries" me a bit is all the plugin development, which makes the platform fragmented. Sure it's also a good thing and we have seen some really great plugins (e.g. from Aymen and others), but still, I think that some of the plugins available now should actually have been a part of the UBot platform.

As for UBot Studio as a whole: It used to be very unstable, going from V3.5 -> 4.x was a nightmare, but it was also a major gearing up. There are some nice features that has come out and I agree that for smaller projects it's a great tool, for bigger bots it's a no go for me until I see that the stability issues are fixed and also some of what I mention below.

I don't do commercially released bots (I use it to automate parts of my, and my staff's, everyday job where I am responsible (as a consultant) for the online sales currently in a company with an annual online revenue of roughly 120 MUSD ), I use it to pull statistics from a lot of sources, aggregating it and build reports that people never thought was possible, create big amounts QRcodes for their campaigns, create parts of their campaigns, upload stuff to adservers, pulling and analyzing CPO levels etc and with the Windows automation I would actually have been able to pull data from their production system _IF_ it was not only accessible through a Citrix solution, so that can't be done (this is not UBot's "fault"). I use it to automate my work. This enables me to do more with less and to get my customers to see that I am producing results in a very fast pace. For my staff I implement the things I do and find to be boring for them to run using my bots.

The development platform is somewhat slow and the crashes are a real pain in the a*s from time to time. I really miss having the ability to have my own defined commands and functions to pass lists and tables as parameters. To me the current setup with the define statement is quite useless. They are more similar to being macros (like assembler macros) to structure the code on a code level, but not really for runtime. Well, not exactly, but something like that.

I also really miss exception handling. If a Ubot made bot is trying to access a site that is not currently available, or if it tries something else that doesn't work, then it will end in an ugly error message. This actually makes me not to use the "set visibility" command. These enhancements should have been finalised a long time ago IMHO.

Similar to many other tools this tool is built by a US company, that apparently is not aware of that the world is a bigger place.   The "$special folder" function is a sign of that. It should e.g. translate the "programfiles" environment variable in Windows, not just assuming that it is "C:\Program Files" because it is NOT. This differs between different localized versions of Windows. I also had an issue with how AltGR was handled by UBot nine months ago, but after I sent a keyboard from my country to Eddie, that problem was solved. (I hope that he uses it frequently when further developing UBot Studio - hmm, maybe I should send them a localized version of Windows too ).

One thing that kind of sucks is that the part of Ubot Studio that is available on disk is just a small fraction of what is needed. First of all the tool must verify the license towards a licensing server, then it seem to download core parts of the Ubot platform. I don't mind that, since I am an honest and paying customer who hates crackers and what they do to the businesses, but since there seem not to be any redundancy on the licensing server and if it is not accessible, then I simply can't use my license to do the stuff that I need. It doesn't happen very often, but it DO happen. The last time for me was just a few days ago and before that it was maybe 5-6 days.

Another thing is that customers, well established customers (ie me ), is seen as potential scammers. I was close to lose my license a year ago. Why? Because I had left my laptop at my customer's place and I forgot to exit UBot Studio before I left the customer that day. When I got back home I continued on the work on my home PC that I had done during the day on my laptop (I sync my projects via Dropbox). The day after I got a harsh mail saying that they suspected me of letting others use my license (two instances of my license was active at the same time, since I had forgot to close UBot Studio on my work laptop). To a customer like me that is well established and is paying for their services, I find such an approach to be - sorry guys @ UBot - unprofessional, especially since the UBot Studio can't be copied and used on a lot of places due to the licensing feature. Well, we cleared out that misunderstanding, but it's still fresh in my mind, because it would be terrible if I lost access to this great tool.

Being a web automation tool I doubt that there is anything better and if the above things would have been fixed (stability, passing tables and lists as parameters so that the defines could become more generic, and with an exception handling, well, then I believe this tool would be outstanding. It is already superior everything else I have seen, but that is probably a result of a market that lacks competition, but fixing these issues would make UBot Studio outstanding. In such a case the only thing that would concern me is that some of the bigger software companies would buy Seth's company so he could retire and that those of us who still uses the tool would have to pay even more for our licenses.

IMO the developer staff seem a bit "pulled back" since maybe 6 months ago, but AFAIK they are staffing up with new ppl so it's probably really a good sign and that the company is doing well - this IS a prerequisite for the rest of us who uses this product.  (I also miss JohnB, a person who used to deal with a lot of the support issues here)


So in all:  It's a good tool that has potential to become outstanding, a customer service that works and is supported by the user community in these forums, I have concerns about the plugin development fragmenting the platform. To me Ubot helps me a lot.

I certainly do not regret purchasing Ubot. It was, and still IS, a great investment!

 

[merkaba 36]

Everyone here has great points. Focus on the longer ones. I can't comment on support, I've only contacted them maybe twice all together and they were timely for me. If you want a better feel for what you may be getting yourself into read the documentation/posts/join the skype groups etc. There is a great community of people and that what makes ubot kind of awesome. 

From a production standpoint, stuff can be pretty touch and go. You learn your way around those problems like a codependent spouse (har har). Issues arise from time to time, but for the most part you can half-ass a pretty amazing bot and with fine tuning it can be a beast. 

There are better languages to learn out there, but being able to put something together in 10 minutes that saves me an hour a week in work is just pure win. 

[Anunymux 0]

Okay thank you all for your replies. I think I will not purchase it since I can not execute it hidden. Nevertheless if this is possible for the standard version of ubot studio in the future I will buy it. 

 

I really like the "wait for page load" feature of ubot. You have to know there is no way in vb6 to wait for the page until it is completely loaded. You have to work with wait commands and sleep commands but this is terrible. 

[jason 101]

Anonymux, I can explain more about running invisibly/in the background. Yes, with UBot Studio you can create a bot that will run when the user first opens the software and what it's doing will be invisible - but you will see an item in the taskbar/manager, and you can open it, but it will be a blank browser. 

 

http://ubotstudio.com/blog/2011/11/22/multithreading-and-sockets-to-dominate-any-site/

 

Watch the video around 11:00 to see an example of the simple command, "Set visibility".

 

Are you trying to create a bot that the user doesn't even realize is running?

 

 

 

[Anunymux 0]

Hey I watched the video and it looks amazing. I love that you can disable pictures or css or some other things. Also you can change the useragent which is brilliant.

 

Yeah I want it hidden. You execute the bot and it navigates to a page submits some data and when it is done it closes the bot automatically. You said this is possible but is it possible with the normal version of ubot studio? I do not want to pay 600$ for the developers edition.

 

By the way is ubot studio using  internet explorer or maybe awesomium?

Edited March 17, 2013 by Anunymux

[Anonym 53]

Trust me, you want Ubot Studio and don't settle with the standard edition. On the other hand, many here will be glad if you wouldn't buy it, because then there is one person less to compete with when selling bots.   I don't sell bots so I don't care...

[Anunymux 0]

I do not want to sell them either. I just want to save lots of time for myself. So is it doable to run the bot hidden in the standard version? Also I found a nice exit command by Aymen which could close my bot when it is done. 

[Anunymux 0]

Okay I have some more questions. I made a bot which navigates to my server and copy's the page content and saves it in a variable. Lets say the page content is just an email adress. So I will save this adress to the variable "email". Then I want to navigate to another site and submit this email there. Thats it. Since the invisible feature is only available in the pro versio of ubot studio I was wondering if I could just bind it with a binder (they have features like running an exe file invisible). This should be possible I guess. 

 

Also I saw that lots of guys made their own control in ubot studio. I have great .net knowledge. So will I be able to do this, too or do I need the dev. edition for this? 

 

Last question is: which browser does ubot studio use? Internet explorer or a chrome variant like awesomium? My vb6 bot uses an ie control which is really annoying because you hear a click sound any time the bot navigates to a new page.

 

And is it possible to run multiple browser windows at the same time? It is faster than navigate from one page to another...My vb6 bot opens 17 browser windows in a form and navigates to all pages...submits the data and then it gets closed automatically when it is done. 

[VaultBoss 310]

• You can start other .exe with the SHELL command
• UBS uses Awesomium
• Multithreading in new browser window is possible (not Standard license though..)

You really seem to need to buy the DEV license to be able to accomplish all you want to...  Good luck!

[Anunymux 0]

Yeah maybe I will do this. Many people use sites like adfly to get some money with their links. Lets say I would let the bot visit each of their links. Will they be valid? Because many website providers have in their TOS something like: No bots, no traffic exchange. Will they know that I've used a bot? Maybe you can spoof the useragent and the referrer. I saw it in a video that this is possible. Will this work or will they still be able to figure out that I've used a bot to get these views?

 

I know that I can start .exe files with the shell command. But I want it hidden in the background. 

[VaultBoss 310]

You will also need very good proxies to fake traffic of any kind.

[Anunymux 0]

No I do not want to fake the traffic. Sorry I forgot to add that I will send the bot to others who will execute it so the ip´s are unique and not faked.