Practice Building Bots in the New UBot Playground

We have just completed building a brand new state-of-the-art web portal for bot makers to abuse and practice their botting skills.

This new playground includes over dozen whole sites inside it that mimic some very well known social media networks and other common types of sites like classifieds and wikis. Make accounts, make posts, scrape data – anything your heart desires. You won’t hurt anyone’s feelings, because every night at midnight all the data will be refreshed.

Have fun with these, seriously. It was a lot of fun to create them and I hope you enjoy testing the limits of what you can do. I’m eager to hear your feedback on how to make them even better.

Seth

How To Start Building Bots

It’s been a long time coming, but finally, at long last, it’s here.

I’d like to introduce my new tutorial series –

The Nuts and Bolts of Bot Building

Nuts and Bolts of Bot-Building

This is a course that breaks down the main concepts of bot building in UBot Studio, although any bot-builder will find it useful. A strong focus on best practices will move you quickly toward mastery.

I’ve personally written these tutorials to give you the methods to do automation the right way. This means you can write bigger and better bots that have less bugs.

Remember – I’m completely obsessed with time management and efficiency. That’s why these tutorials are written to deliver the most important information in the shortest time possible, while still being fun and enjoyable to read. 

I’d really like to hear your feedback about these. Am I missing anything ? Do you have any tips and tricks to share? 

 

 

Seth

 

How to Build a Site Monitor Bot To Check Your Uptime and Alert You If Your Website Goes Down!

What’s the worst thing that you can imagine happening to your website?

Okay, the absolute worst is probably your site getting entirely deleted. We can probably help you with that, because UBot Studio can auto-backup your site if you want it to.

But, we’re going to share something a little simpler today. A bot to notify you if ANYTHING goes wrong with your website!

This is a free bot that gives you a call if your site is down. It checks if the site is down (is it down for everyone), then chooses an action based on your preference. 

This is helpful if you expect large amounts of traffic, haven’t had time to set up a redundancy server, or just in general want to make sure that everything is going well at all times on your website. This bot could be modified to check any number of websites. It doesn’t use any features beyond UBot Studio Standard and is very simple to operate. Here’s how it works.

 

While other site monitors run on the web and usually cost a monthly fee, with UBot Studio you can build a totally free site monitoring bot that you can run on any Windows PC or any server which can check over and over again to see if your site is experiencing issues. Competing companies like Pagerduty and Pingability and UptimeRobot cost money each month, or will only email you or text you. This UBot Studio uBot can monitor your site totally for free, and if you wanted to modify it, it could check any number of sites if you want. In fact, with UBot Studio you could build an entire site monitoring bot army and create your own website monitoring company that calls whoever you need if there’s an issue! You could even build a bot that automatically reboots your site if there’s an issue, or a bot that texts you, or calls specific people depending on the day of the week or the time of day.

 

But let’s start with the basics: This simple, free bot will give you a call if your site shows up on is it down or not. Here’s the code:

 

ui stat monitor("Downtime Count: ",#downtime)
set(#downtime,0,"Global")
ui text box("Phone Number",#phonenumber)
ui text box("Website",#website)
loop while($comparison(1,"= Equals",1)) {
    navigate("http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/{#website}","Wait")
    wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
    if($exists(<innertext=w"*not just you! *">)) {
        then {
            log("Site Down!")
            increment(#downtime)
            navigate("https://manager.linode.com/","Wait")
            wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
            wait(10)
            type text(,"username","Standard")
            type text(,"password","Standard")
            click(,"Left Click","No")
            wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
            wait(10)
            click(<innerhtml="linode123456">,"Left Click","No")
            wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
            wait(10)
            wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
            click(<value="Reboot">,"Left Click","No")
            wait(800)
            navigate("http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/{#website}","Wait")
            wait for browser event("DOM Ready","")
            if($exists(<innertext=w"*not just you! *">)) {
                then {
                    log("Site Still Down! Calling people")
                    navigate("http://www.callmylostphone.com/","Wait")
                    type text(<name="recipient">,#phonenumber,"Standard")
                    click(<value="Make it ring!">,"Left Click","No")
                    wait(30)
                    navigate("http://www.callmylostphone.com/","Wait")
                    type text(<name="recipient">,#phonenumber,"Standard")
                    click(<value="Make it ring!">,"Left Click","No")
                    wait(30)
                    navigate("http://www.callmylostphone.com/","Wait")
                    type text(<name="recipient">,#phonenumber,"Standard")
                    click(<value="Make it ring!">,"Left Click","No")
                    increment(#down)
                }
                else {
                }
            }
            else {
            }
        }
    }
    log("Site Up. Running in 15 Minutes!")
    wait(10000)
}

Download the .ubot file here: Website Uptime Script

As you can see this bot is extremely simple. But like most things, the idea of checking your website to see if it’s up is actually extraordinary easy. People often pay tens or even hundreds of dollars per month to have a simple service like this completed by a third-party. Why do that, when with UBot Studio you can create your own army of bots to do your bidding, always making sure your server and website are running smoothly? We hope you enjoy this free bot! If you have any more questions about you about Studio, just let us know! 

How to Make Money in The UBot Network

The New UBot Network is still in beta, but now is a great time to show off to some of the visitors UBot Studio gets. So how can you profit?

(Oh, and don’t forget – It doesn’t matter if you’ve already been selling your bots, plugins, or training. Put them in the Store or fill out your profile on /Freelance and you’ll get a bump from all the new traffic/customers we’ll be sending your way.)

  1. Sell your executable bots in the Store (so even customers without UBot Studio can try them).

    301 Nuke

    The Store is a professional way for you to promote your products

  2. Sell your source code in the Store.
  3. Sell your plugins in the Store.
  4. Give away your FREE bots/plugins in the Store, then when your paid bots/plugins are ready, email your new customers.
  5. Give away your Free training in /Learn and link to it from the Store to show how much you know.
  6. Share your Free training in /Learn and link to it from /Freelance to show how much you know.
  7. Partner with us! If you have an amazing product, idea, or training course, we’ll feature it to all of our customers.
  8. Pay for a Developer to build that plugin you’ve always wanted….
  9. …Then sell it on the Store.
  10. Combine all your free Forum code snippets/plugins together and post them in the Store for free to get great reviews…
  11. …Then sell your paid code snippets.
  12. Write a great blog post about
    1. Building bots
    2. The ways you make money
    3. The learning process for UBot
    4. Quick tips for botting
    5. How you built your favorite plugin
    6. The top ten best bot ideas you’ve never built…
  13. …And then share it on your /Store and /Freelance profile.
  14. Sell your paid training on /Learn.
  15. Read through posts on the Forum to see what others need and build it.
  16. Search posts on other forums and see what others need and build that.
  17. Got a product that you think could be better? Build it. Sell it.
  18. Still improving your skills as a UBot Developer? No problem. Our customers are looking for marketers, JV partners, designers, web site builders, and lots more to work with and improve their businesses.
    1. Post whatever skills you have on /freelance!
    2. Write a blog post about what you DO know, and then link that to a paid course on /learn.
    3. Build an application in any programming language – we aren’t picky. As long as our customers want what you’re selling, you’re free to post it on the Store or elsewhere.
  19. If you are a professional developer, with programming skills, write a course on using UBot Studio alongside the coding languages that you like.
  20. Still unsure? Check out our LENGTHY list of ideas in our introduction to UBot Studio course on /Learn. Then do a few of them and sell them in the Store.

 

Have more ideas or questions? Add them here!

 

UBot Stealth Has Arrived.

The wait is over.

After many months of development and testing, the new version of UBot Studio has arrived –

UBot Studio Stealth Features

(A few of these features are in the Bot Bank, and a few came out in advance of Stealth. But this is the moment you’ve been waiting for – the release that brings it all together!)

Let me explain some of the most revolutionary features.

Cef: A Brand New, Super Fast Browsing Engine


With Stealth, you will have access to the most advanced, bleeding-edge browser framework currently available. We’ve rebuilt the entire browser engine using CEF, but for compatibility, we’ve included a simple switch to let you choose the old browser or the new one.

One-button headless browsing (Professional Feature)

‘Headless’ browsing means that your browser doesn’t have a graphical interface. This makes it faster – if it’s connecting without rendering HTML and loading images, for example, it’ll speed things up as it’s moving along the web. For simplicity we’ve added this simple switch to make sure everyone knew how to join this new modern age of headless botting.

In Stealth, you can simply drop the “set headless browser” command into your scripts for scary-fast automation. You’ll use none of the overhead that it takes to continuously visually render each page. Headless is the future of botting. It’s the reason why languages like Python and libraries like PhantomJS have grown in the botting world.

 

Headless browsing in UBot means you simply drop a “Set Headless Browser” command into your script and everything happens in the background. Better than PhantomJS or other headless browsers because you still get to build your bot with the incredible UBot Studio visual interface. You’ll complete more tasks at once and build more powerful tools that are as effective as anything a programmer could create. You’ll want to use this one with caution. Especially when you combine it with multithreading.

Full Header Control (Professional Feature)


The internet is tracking every move you make. One way this happens is through headers. But with full header control, you can change that.

What’s a header? When you connect to a website, all the information you give about yourself is a header – the user agent (browser type), referrer (where you came from), and everything else.

In Stealth, you can rewrite the fundamental connection variables that your bots communicate to servers with.

Simply use the new “set header” command and you can modify any arbitrary header you want. You now have the power to fully control how a web page sees you.

Thread Spawn (Professional Feature)

UBot Studio Stealth introduces the ThreadSpawn system – a tool that allows you to write UBot scripts with the same drag and drop simplicity you expect, and instantly spawn as many threads as you desire. You choose how many threads you want to run concurrently, and UBot Studio does the rest. Thread spawn cuts code down, saving you time, and solves the complications of multi-threading.

All of the power of multithreaded bots, none of the headache. And yes, you can even multithread headless bots. Watch it in this demo, which starts with a regular browser in threadspawn and ends with headless bots in a threadspawn.

Introducing – Incognito Mode (Developer Feature)

Incognito Mode: The new Dev Stealth feature to run your compiled bots COMPLETELY invisibly.

Yes, it does spell UBot. But watch how I did that….

With Incognito Mode,

  • You can compile uBots into command line only tools
  • You can combine with the “set headless browser” command for super-fast Stealth botting
  • You can run a uBot as a hidden process, allowing you to seamlessly integrate it into VB.Net, C#, Python, or any other windows language, and run it to load other programs
  • You can even automate Windows completely invisibly.
  • You can generate your user interface separately, and let your uBot just worry about the functionality
  • You can add your uBot command line tools to part of a larger library written in the language of your choice
  • You can create a master compiled uBot that spawns other uBots… an army of uBots controlled by a single interface!

If you aren’t subscribed yet, make sure to subscribe to get the latest features.

As you can see, the latest version of UBot Studio adds a huge amount of functionality to the previous versions.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do!