We will be rolling out a system to attempt to trap and identify spammers on steemit! The system is fairly simple and we will roll it out as a setting for all users. How it works is simple:
Every day a randomly selected group of Shadow Casters will generate a post automatically. There will be 2 kinds of posts, each time your account is selected it will randomly choose which type.
Comment Honey Pot (CHP)
When your account is selected to generate a CHP, ShadowBot will generate a post informing humans very clearly what it is. It will indicate that it is for catching bot spam and that up voting will help you! It will also make it very clear DO NOT REPLY OR COMMENT on this post or you WILL BE FLAGGED AS A SPAMMER! People who see these posts may chose to upvote you for helping the community fight spam!
Upvote Honey Pot (UHP)
When your account is selected to generate a UHP, ShadowBot will generate a post informing humans very clearly what it is. It will indicate that you should NOT UP VOTE THIS POST.
Using a combination of CHP and UHP across many accounts we believe will allows us to trap bots into our web, identify them, and add them to a special list for all to see!
ShadowBot will monitor CHPs and UHPs it generates for all members for violations of the terms (No Commenting or No Voting). Those who violate the terms will get points, and enough points will lead to a blacklisting. This is very much inline with how email honeypots work!
UPDATE
CHPs and UHPs will be ignored by the Shadow Queue. This will not unfairly create posts that then lead to free up votes from ShadowBot and it's Casters!
If anyone has any input we are still developing this and would love the feedback!!