Attack of the comment bots was thwarted! Well, it wasn't a large attack about 5 or 6. But stopping these types of abuse before they have a financial gain is the goal.
I'm expanding my skills pulling data from mongoDB. After about 12 hours in the last few days I've learned to hack together queries pretty good. One of the things I wanted to identify was comment spammers. What I got was another shock.
Top Commenters for July 24th
Did someone really spend over 8 hours of their day posting a comment every 20 seconds? I headed over to look at their comments. I didn't immediately see any duplicate comments so Iheaded back to mongoDB & SteemData to pull some more data.
Errr... Hmm... It's a BOT!!!! Before I headed off to search for more data I shared a screenshot of preliminary numbers with a few people. Digging into this I looked at a 7 day period and found it seems to be a recent development at least.
When steemit.chat chimed in that another room was added to my list I wasn't really all that excited until I noticed it was a private channel dedicated to getting rid of these mass spam accounts. With a coordinated effort we identified and flagged the accounts running bots.
A big thank you to the person that got us all together and to all of those that helped by donating their time to flag the accounts identified as spam bots to -1 reputation.
Top Commenters for July 25th
And pretty much back to the normal comment spammers today.
Top Commenters From Midnight UTC Today
I've created a few useful scripts that I'll keep handy to monitor the comment bot situation for a while. With any luck we won't see any more bots like these.
I also created a script to help identify accounts in relation to this, So I just flagged a spammer with ~3400 accounts voting numbered comments.., type of comment and up-vote abuse.
