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Bot vs library/app

Open Simbiat opened this issue 2 years ago • 3 comments

I've noticed, that some bots look more like apps or libraries, for example Castro 2 (http://supertop.co/castro/) has an app on Apple Store, and MagpieRSS (https://magpierss.sourceforge.net/) is a library. Is there a logic, that we can use to differentiate?

Since I will go through the bots to get icons for them for my icon pack, I do not mind creating a PR, that would move some of the bots to app or library, but I would need to know what logic to follow, if this is even something that needs to be done in the first place.

Simbiat avatar Oct 21 '23 12:10 Simbiat

From my understanding a bot is everything that happens somewhat automatically without any further user interaction. So an App that triggers a request to a server is not a bot. But if a server automatically fetches data from another site in order to somehow present it (in an App) to the user (without the user explicitly requesting it), this might more be a bot behavior imho.

sgiehl avatar Oct 30 '23 09:10 sgiehl

But what if a bot (or an app for that matter) uses a library? Or if an app can be ran both manually and automatically (through cron)?

Simbiat avatar Oct 30 '23 09:10 Simbiat

Yeah, it's sometime hard to distinguish between them. In general if we are able to detect and app or bot we should do that, even if they use a detectable library. I would see those library detections more as a fall back if nothing more specific could be detected.

sgiehl avatar Oct 30 '23 10:10 sgiehl