Bot Forum Accounts

hrobertson · October 21, 2018, 2:55am

When either of you have a moment @INovaeFlavien, @INovaeKeith, here are some forum bot accounts that could do with being deleted/banned.

While looking through them I noticed @tim-sweeney has already been suspended for “Impersonating a public figure for the purpose of marketing on our platform”.

hrobertson · October 31, 2018, 10:08am

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/Keith-Tamine …just liked my above post.

dekaku · November 1, 2018, 8:07pm

More bots (presumably):

dekaku · November 3, 2018, 12:22pm

Aaand another bot (presumably), who liked a couple of posts, filled out its profile and then fucked off

Edit with another presumed Bot account, that makes me want to be able to have a setting to delete their likes from my post, because I dont want to have anything to do, even by by proxy, with the garbage person who is responsible for those:

second edit, went through the autobiograph badges awarded between december last year and now and added picked out profiles which were suspicious. Couple of blockchain bullshit, couple of car rentals, couple of random ad accounts:

Profiles I am certain that exist only for spam:

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/setarehsaadat - indian car rental
https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/aceluxurywine
https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/pplimos
https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/AlphaPsychoTher

Accounts that are potentially the above:

Edits after original post:

Presumed bot accounts that voluntarily liked my posts:

Accounts that used a famous persons name:
https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/dennis-rodman (uses a profile pic with a link on it to another blockchain coin thing)

Playbenni · November 9, 2018, 8:34pm

Arkenbrien · November 9, 2018, 8:59pm

What’s with these accounts anyways?

pictbrige · November 9, 2018, 9:43pm

Crypto-platform in description about user,that mr.Arkenbrein

Sab1e · November 10, 2018, 9:07pm

I do seem to be getting a flurry of random likes to various posts. I have a hard time judging if these are bots or just new lurkers turning up and reading stuff. I logged on today and had 8 notifications about likes on various posts, half of which I’d forgotten about! It’s strange.

Edit: is there a bot check on account creation? Like Captcha or whatever?

Edit 2: I wonder if @inovaekeith can limit the number of Likes you can give out per day, or something. Some of these new accounts sign up and have dished out 50 likes or more within 15 minutes…

Arkenbrien · November 10, 2018, 9:40pm

I seem to recall asking for more than 50 likes a day, but that was during the KS.

Anyways, here’s another bot:

https://forums.inovaestudios.com/u/darry_chen/summary - begging for indiegogo funding

Ovrki1 · November 10, 2018, 10:31pm

there’s a million bots on the forum guys. prolly wasting your time pointing out each individual. but if you want your credit, by all means continue.

dekaku · November 11, 2018, 12:19pm

I can see where you are coming from.

However, the number of presumed spam/ad/bot accounts is still fairly manageable, as there are currently 8608 users registered (at least if the overview page is correct). A single person could monitor each and every account and make an educated guess on the validity of that account in a single work day (8 hours), though it would be an extremely unpleasant day (assuming that the person can’t use any tools, like searching for specific properties that most of those accounts share). After that, said person would then have to check daily on the new signups of the previous day, which would probably be around 5-10 minutes, which is manageable.
Anyway, there are a couple of problems with these accounts:

They are abusing this site’s systems to gain profit at the expense of the user base. At best, they are doing straight advertisement, at worst, they are linking to malicious sites that will turn the user’s machine into a bot upon visiting.
Just from my personal point of view, there seems to be an increase in bot signups. Granted, this might be because I am now paying attention towards these, but if the number of bot signups per day increases, it might be a hint that the signup procedure isn’t doing a proper job of keeping bots at bay, and it might be in our best interest to fix that loophole as long as there arent actually millions of bots signed up.
Each and every bot account can change its behaviour at the flick of a switch. Currently they are set to a fairly passive behaviour, where all they do is dump (potentially malicious) links in their bio and then like a couple of posts. What if, one day the creator of those accounts decides to use them to actively send posts into threads, whenever someone posts something? You then would be faced with hundreds of accounts posting malicious content, making proper discourse migh impossible (which is helped by the fact that the forums software developer actively spoke out against an “ignore user” feature, arguing that they do this in order to force people to not just live in an echo chamber but also to consider the opinions that might be contrary to their own. All that, in order to improve the quality of discussions on this software)
Their specific behaviour of liking posts undermines the feature that we are used to use in order to determine the quality of a post when skimming over a discussion. It also fills the notifications of those who get their posts like with junk. For example: Out of my 12 most recent notifications, 9 are posts liked by bots.
The above points can have long-term detrimental effects to the forum. I remember being in forums that pretty much died, because the bots in there weren’t dealt with (either because the admins didn’t care or had left the community).

hrobertson · November 11, 2018, 2:59pm

I don’t think anyone’s looking for credit. It’s just a bit annoying when I keep getting notifications when bots like my posts. I simply take a look at their profile and it’s obvious if it’s bot.

I certainly wouldn’t bother looking through new users trying to identify any bots, unless I was a moderator.

cybercritic · November 12, 2018, 10:32am

Is there a captcha when signing up? There surely must be a plugin for that, maybe @inovaekeith should look into it, it will at least be a deterrence to fully automated bots.

INovaeKeith · November 13, 2018, 12:21am

Yeah it’s something I’m going to have to investigate.

Arkenbrien · November 13, 2018, 3:22am

sirstevotimothy
Sir Stevo Timothy Bot for Facebook

Not even hiding it.

hrobertson · November 18, 2018, 10:24am

hrobertson · January 9, 2019, 4:15pm

Oh wow…

Arkenbrien · January 9, 2019, 5:06pm

… whaaaaat is that…

hrobertson · January 11, 2019, 1:25am

Sab1e · January 11, 2019, 9:53pm

Oh for crying out loud. I really do worry about the mental state of the folk who waste their time creating bots like this.

Actually… I don’t worry about it at all…