Bot deterrent

[Painasbread]

I don't see no thread regarding self advertisement of bots or random people in the forums.

These people have unused fresh accounts and the first thing they do is pollute the forums (and usually every next action is also a waste of space).

Maybe it'd be useless to have a requirement before being able to create your own thread or profile post (because easily avoided or penalising regular users also), I just think it'd be nice if there were a solution available to make their life harder.

Perhaps some of you have better ideas than mine. Or perhaps this thread is unnecessary because it's useless to make their life harder and easier to ban them after they've been caught. Idk.

Please enlighten me.

 

[Angry_Panda]

Build a better bot trap, and someone will build a better bot.

Maybe one of the mods will weigh in; here's my pure speculation as a not-mod:

From the ban reason list in the support forum on the Discord, it sounds like there is an automated spam filter on the forums, but regardless of how that works or gets calibrated, there are the twin risks of not catching 'clever' bots (or patient human operated spam accounts) and accidentally flagging genuine users. In general, the latter seems much more problematic, so I would guess that filter's set fairly 'loose,' at the risk of allowing some spam/bots to make it through.

Another forum I'm on requires moderator approval to make the first couple posts on an account visible to everyone else, which helps prevent most of this behavior from being rewarding to the bot, but I'm not sure MD wants to go that route with their current level of manpower (actually, I would wager a dozen donuts they don't). I would guess their current model of 'use a light touch up front and remove reported bots/spam that do make it through' is making more efficient use of the manpower they do have available.

 

[BakedBanana]

I would guess their current model of 'use a light touch up front and remove reported bots/spam that do make it through' is making more efficient use of the manpower they do have available.

Plus the forums here encompass a small community, meaning everyone usually is ontop of reporting these bots and sweeping them out before they cause harm. I would probably begin to worry when the bots start advertising sketchy stuff in obscure manga pages, where only randoms would see it.

 

[Painasbread]

Another forum I'm on requires moderator approval to make the first couple posts on an account visible to everyone else, which helps prevent most of this behavior from being rewarding to the bot, but I'm not sure MD wants to go that route with their current level of manpower (actually, I would wager a dozen donuts they don't). I would guess their current model of 'use a light touch up front and remove reported bots/spam that do make it through' is making more efficient use of the manpower they do have available.

That's an interesting idea!

Imagine a similar setting where it's the regular people who have to decide if the person's first messages are from a bot or not, like the cs:go 5 vods review per day per person of reported users, to confirm if those were hacking or not.

Anyway this would probably still require mods' input, and we don't have that many people interested in doing that lmao.

So I suppose leaving it as is is the best option for now.