EVE Technology Lab

Hey guys,

As you may have seen there was a post on Reddit, which then started a thread on the forums here, about how you could detect mobile siphon units through the API. When mobile siphons were introduced we decided we did not want you to be able to detect them via the API and so put measures into place to ensure you could not.

The post on Reddit gave a supposed example of detecting these siphons via the API. Their example was simple:

1. Setup a POS and harvester.
2. Check the API and notice it is working. In their case there was 100 units in the silo.
3. Empty the silo.
4. Deploy mobile siphon.
5. Wait an hour, check API, notice only 40 units instead of the 100 that should be there, clearly a siphon MUST be involved.

You can see the Reddit post here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/2dgv6n/ccp_allows_siphon_detection_through_api/

There are a few suspect about the post, but lets ignore that and pretend that is all legit as others have now reported this same issue.

I went on Sisi and did the following:

1. Deploy POS
2. Anchor silo and harvester
3. Setup the chain
4. Advanced the cycle
5. 100 units went into the siphon
6. Checked API, 100 units there
7. Removed the 100 units from the silo
8. Deployed siphon
9. Advanced the POS cycle
10. Checked in the client and there was 40 units clearly in the silo
11. Checked the API and it showed 100 units, as if nothing had been siphoned

So admittedly I did a few things players cannot:

• Advanced the cycle of the POS manually
• Cleared the API cache

I have repeated the above without those with the same result. This is just my much easier to reproduce test case because to hell with waiting hours for things to cycle and caches to expire.

Before we continue I want to point out that if the siphon does not exist in space we report the exact contents of silos, not the fudged numbers.

What I am looking for is someone who can offer a 100% reproducible test case (if you need help testing like the API cache on Sisi cleared let me know) or an instance of this happening on TQ/Sisi right now. One that you have not touched since noticing it happening and that we can look into.

If you can come up with one of the above we would greatly appreciate it. If you do please feel free to contact me at the following:
@RegnerBA on twitter
[CCP]FoxFour on irc.coldfront.net
CCP FoxFour in EVE Mail
regner [insert some kind of sign relating to email here] ccpgames.com

On a final note, we here at CCP really do appreciate it when you contact us directly about issues instead of telling everyone about problems that can be used to negatively impact their experience. There are many ways to do so, bug reports with good steps detailing how to reproduce something is generally the best way. You can however also EVE Mail specific devs if you know they are active. Twitter or IRC also work.

The main point is we really appreciate discretion in these kinds of things, and publicly posting just makes us really not like you very much. In crazy cases if we know your character or account you may even find your API restuls suddenly have the following appended to them:

[specialMessageJustForYou]You can find the bug reporting page here https://community.eveonline.com/support/submit-bug-report and using that makes us friends. Stop being a bad.[/specialMessageJustForYou]

* [ used instead of < because forums.