BTCTap.hol.es - Faucet update

Hello everyone,

Couple of weeks ago I've posted that I'm trying myself within the faucet world.
Well at the very beginning it was looking very nice, traffic was flowing through my faucet and people were gaining satoshis. The fun lasted for couple of days.

Then I got hit badly by the bots and cheaters. All my money I've loaded to the faucet was gone within one night.

Well I was kind of expecting it, but I was surprised how fast it went. I was using a free script from Faucetbox, which is actually quite good for people who want to get into the world of hosting their own faucet. The big but is, it has 0 security. Yes you can play around banning bitcoind addresses and IPs, but it does not help. Scammers will find their way to get your money. As the script is very popular, on one hand you get lot of traffic, as people know how to use it. On the other hand there are tons of bots on the internet to misuse your faucet.

Well I didn't give up, shut the site down for a while and took a better look at it. Maybe for the first attempt I was bit in a rush. I didn't want to make the same mistake again.

I found a script written in PHP on the net and was able to learn it much better than the first one. So I started to modify it with the past mistakes in my mind. The mistakes I did with my first attempt:

• Did not understand the code of the script to modify it
• Had little to none security measures
• Was not in control of the payments

Couple of days ago, I've re-launched my faucet. With much better design, as I actually put some work into it and also looking at some other high paying long lasting faucets. I've also added a login screen and I was able to modify my admin panel so have full control of the things going on. The faucet has the following features:

• Login page
• Payment treshold
• Manual verification
• Ability to ban bitcoin addresses
• Investigation if the claims are valid

In terms of traffic, I'm not there yet where I was with my old faucet. As many of the listings marked it as not paying. I personally think, with the time this will change. I think it's better know to have a slower start so I can still adapt if I see any glitches.

Now to the good things. Even with the old faucet I was able to find a way to monetize the faucet. I'm using advertiser called a-ads also know as Anonymous ads. I'm quite happy with the earnings, for now it's more than I'm giving out which is a plus. I've already been paid twice within the short time. Here is the proof of it.

 
20'000 satoshis in two weeks time is not bad, isn't it?

Again as my other project, I have plans to expand further.

• Get a proper domain name
• Get Google Adsense to approve my site
• Do direct payments and not via Faucetbox
• Increase the satoshis per claim
• Improve security

The top two things go together. I first need to get a own domain name and once that is sorted out I'm heading for Google's approval. Google is the number 1 CPM paying network on the internet, so that is a must in order to survive and make my faucet attractive, which is the fourth point on my list. Third thing is to get rid of Faucetbox as a payment processor as they are claiming 2.5% of each deposit I'm doing for them to fill my faucets wallet. On the other hand I need to increase the threshold then, as somewhere I've read the minimum amount of bitcoins to be sent is bit more than 5k.

That's all for now. I'll keep you posted on my progress.