All a moot point since Veracity added support, but I feel like chiming in anyway.
This is my sixth Crimbo and I'm pretty sure I discovered KoLmafia before the first one. In my opinion there have been four valid reasons for not automating Crimbo content as it occurs:
- Hola - the visionary behind KoLmafia - felt it was wrong.
- KoLmafia was believed to increase lag.
- KoLmafia was believed to encourage inactive accounts to become active or new accounts to be created in order to farm, hence more lag.
- Players not reading the content and just farming made the KoL developers "sad".
While Hola's vision is still respected, he is no longer an active participant in the project (compared to his prior involvement).
On an individual basis it has been pretty extensively demonstrated that a user who plays with mafia and does the exact same thing as a user with a plain browser will hit the server the same number of times or less. (Fewer? I never get that right)
KoL's infrastructure has improved so that it can handle increased numbers of users much better and as a consequence, lag is not the problem it once was.
So the last point is the only one that remains valid today and it appears that CDMoyer and TPTB are not willing to go so far as to ask that it not be automated, probably because (unlike in the past) KoLmafia is only one of several tools that can be used to automate.
So while I respect the previous decisions, I see no reason not to change or relax the policy (which is what Veracity has effectively done).
As far as posting a request for "how to do something", that at the time of the request was a feature explicitly rejected by the developers, that seems pretty tacky to me, even if the policy has changed. Open source means everyone has access and can make their own changes but it does not mean the dev team needs to help people make changes that the team has explicitly rejected.