How do we fight fire? With fire of course.
Many of us have started to notice the influx of spam as bots start posting automated content, usually plagiarized, to our wonderful website. Right now, there is not much a single user can do to prevent these posts. Personally, I am sick of it, so I created my own bot to help fight the abuse: I have started gathering a Ban List, and am adding accounts to it that are notorious for spam. They will be automatically flagged (downvoted), and a reply will be posted.
How can YOU help?
You can help in three simple ways:
- Always flag posts that are spam, plagiarism, otherwise low quality, or clearly posted by bots.
- Find bots that are spamming: report them to us (so we can add them to our ban list).
- Upvote the good bots! The more power you give to our good bots, the more weight they have in their downvoting of spam.
Going forward.
I am hoping to partner up with other wonderful people, many of whom are active in the #steemitabuse channel on slack. I am going to continue working on my bot, to make it better at detecting bad content.
If you are interesting in helping, there is a bounty available for plagiarism detection:
https://steemit.com/steem/@cryptoctopus/usd500-bounty-we-need-this-now
And you can always join us on slack! If you have concerns about the bot, feel free to chat with me there.
My personal bot, @cheetah, is now on the prowl.
Photo by User Mukul2u , from wikipedia.
Special thanks to the following people for being awesome in the spam fighting initiative:
@xeroc (for Piston, an instrumental tool), @cryptoctopus, @pfunk, @ash, @neoxian, and all the others.
A quick edit, using some of this attention.
I personally really support this proposal: https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/176 Please have a look! I hope that this bot is only a band-aid, and that we can fix the real problem at the roots.
Also, there is now a nice spot to help with flagging: #doyourpart