[zram21]

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You say "They'll outlaw scraping" like that's the end of it. The thing is, if I can open as many instances of Party as I want, and load 4 tables on each w/o logging in, I don't much care what they allow. They're not going to be able to stop me.

I like mining better when it's legal, but I don't see a big problem in running against their rules here.
-Sam

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Just because you haven't logged in with your ID yet doesn't mean that there are not ways to determine who you are. Assuming you save your ID and password they could potantially read that information out of the file it is sotred in on your machine. They also at the very least will log the IP address that made the connection and you could have trouble if you end up logging in from the same IP that they logged a screen scraping program from.

Party has shown that they are willing to take steps to keep people from using programs they deem against their T&C. They have already shown in the past that they scan your machine for programs that they have banned. Once you make a connection to their servers they can do that whether you log in or not.

In addition it would be fairly simple to create a unique key based on the computer that is logging in for each instance pf party. Justr as Poker Ace, and Poker Tracker etc make a unique key for your installation. They could certainly set something up that just disallowed that instance of Party making a successful connection again no matter who logs in from it. Presumably you could get around this by reinstalling the program, but if they caught the program once they will certainly catch it again.

On top of all of that. They could always just fix the bug that allows you to spawn multiple copies of Party that would also be very easy to fix by just amking the program s5-10 seconds before it spawns and then run it's check to see if another isntance is running.

I don;t know if they will go to all of these lengths to stop data mining, but they certainly could and it wouldn;t be that difficult to do.