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December 21st, 2020 × #Bots#PS5#Web Scraping

Hasty Treat - How Would We Script a PS5 Buying Bot?

Wes and Scott discuss bot strategies for buying popular, hard to find items like the PlayStation 5, including scraping retailer sites, avoiding bot-prone retailers, and using tools like Puppeteer and LowDB.

Wes Bos

Wes Bos Host

Scott Tolinski

Scott Tolinski Host

or
Show Notes Transcript

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

  1. You need a way to find out of there is stock
    • Find out of there is an API endpoint you can hit (inspect element)
  2. If there is not, you'll need to scrape the site.
  3. Fetch(url). text()
  4. Regex
  5. Cheerio
  6. Puppeteer (slower, easier to run)
  7. Save any data that you want in a database. Text-based database is great.
  8. Re-run the scrape every N mins
  9. 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
      • document.querySelector()

11:35 - Things that get in the way

  • Blocked IP
    • Use a VPN
  • Captcha or Cloudflare
  • Run it on your local computer
  • Use Puppeteer to get all cookies and headers

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