What is @broombot?
The community needs a free and anonymous way to give feedback to bot owners who have comment bots. What better feedback than downvotes?
@broombot is a joint @steemcleaners and @spaminator project with the help of @nnnarvaez.
I've had this idea percolating in the back of my mind for a while. It's one of those things that I keep turning over and over and contemplating the logical process along with the possible abuse.
I enlisted the help of @nnnarvaez who is a fellow witness and a great guy who is passionate about helping those in his native country of Venezuela, educating them on the use of steemit.com, and stopping abuse.
It's been a rough couple of months getting @broombot in to production for both of us as 'Real Life' has a habit of putting up roadblocks but @broombot is ready to start sweeping!
How do I use @broombot?
@broombot is ready for limited testing by members of the community. If you'd like to register to use @broombot please contact a member of @steemcleaners on Discord.
Registration is required to prevent abuse of @broombot. After speaking to a member of @steemcleaners you will be granted access to the registration channel if you are approved for this beta.
Type ;reg <steemit username> and @broombot will DM you instructions. 0.003 SBD is required to register but it will be returned to you.
After you have successfully registered you can DM broombot links to bot comments you perceive as spam for downvoting! To prevent accidental downvoting by those who think this is an upvote bot the format for your DM should be ;downvote <link>.
Anti-abuse Measures
Registration
Users are required to register with the bot. After @broombot is released into the wild, users will be monitored for abuse. Anyone caught abusing @broombot will be banned. What is abuse? Other than targeting specific bots maliciously we haven’t defined that yet. I’m sure we’ll have more to add in the coming days.
Bot list
There is a predefined list of bots that can be downvoted to prevent it from being used to flag other users. The list excludes opt-in bots for curation groups such as @shadow3scalpel and @utopian-io.
There has been some discussion about opt-out bots. For the time being they will remain on the list.
If you find a bot that is not on the list you can submit me a request to add it. Right now the list is short but in the next 24 hours it will be populated with a number of known bots.
General information about @broombot
Commenting/Posting
Because the @broombot account will be doing the flagging it will not post or comment, ever. This will keep its reputation locked in at 25. The idea is to give feedback - not kill account reputations.
All posts and comments related will be done by @raguel. The next phase of development is to provide bot owners with a weekly report in the form of a comment on their latest post.
@botowner X members of the community have requested @broombot to flag X number of comments as spam. You were flagged by @broombot x number of times in the last 7 days.
Multiple members of the community can request the same comment to be flagged. Currently there is only one flag account - @broombot.
Flag Weight
Currently the account has 780 SP and the flag weight is set to 1%. This will be adjusted in the future. My goal is to have the weight just heavy enough to remove payout and hide the comment.
Delegations
Anyone wishing to help sweep up the bot spam comments can delegate to @broombot! @broombot will never upvote.