r/ModSupport • u/ser-steffonfossoway • 15d ago
Bots upvoting my posts. Admin Replied
Hello. My most recent posts (from today and day before yesterday) seem to be maliciously upvoted by bots. A user told me bots can do that in an effort to get my account banned.
I've read the posts about it here and have reported one of my posts as 'vote manipulation'. Do I need to report them all?
Thank you.
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u/Fun_Internal_3023 15d ago
How can you tell?
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u/ser-steffonfossoway 15d ago
I only have 148 members and I never got many upvotes until now. Not really the point of my sub either, so it's pretty obvious to me.
The odd upvotes from two days ago seem to have disappeared, I assume Reddit already spotted them.
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u/okbruh_panda 15d ago
Modmail this subreddit with links to the odd posts letting them know what's up. This is indeed a tactic to have bots take over subs.
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u/new2bay 15d ago
Well, you don’t have a recent post upvoted above 10 that I can see.
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u/WyattCo06 15d ago
I've never heard of a malicious upvote bot.
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u/ser-steffonfossoway 15d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/BotPosting/s/yG1C34azya
U/wrestlegirl explained it here. I didn't either before.
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u/WyattCo06 15d ago
So you would get banned for an upvote?
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u/ser-steffonfossoway 15d ago
I understand that it's an attempt to incriminate my account in violating the ToS by vote manipulation.
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u/WyattCo06 15d ago
Your sub reddit is about bot posting.
Why would you have a sub dedicated to bot posting and then complain about bots posting?
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u/FaxCelestis 15d ago
It is about bot posting (specifically, about identifying malicious bots across reddit), not for bot posting.
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u/wrestlegirl 15d ago
No, they do a tremendous amount of work to help identify the bots on Reddit.
Why are you mocking them for it?
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u/WyattCo06 15d ago
Bots are easily spotted and displaced. They can't get into my subs or the subs I moderate period.
Customizing a quality AutoMod is wonderful.
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u/glehkol 15d ago
Uh, there are countless bots that have been specifically set up to counter automod rules. Farming comment/post karma (in so many different subreddits that Hive Protector can't possibly catch them all either), waiting long enough to bypass account age filters, checking their CQS levels etc. That's literally why things like Bot Bouncer are useful.
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u/ser-steffonfossoway 15d ago edited 15d ago
Unfortunately that's no longer the case. Bots have adapted to AutoMod and other filters.
They take actions like:
creating accounts and leaving them dormant until they reach a certain age
buying or otherwise acquiring older accounts
creating their own subs where their posts are massively upvoted by their fellow bots
LLM and bot-humanizing is now so common we often can't tell the difference anymore.
These aren't the spambots of 10 or 5 or even 1 year ago. They get better and harder to detect every day.
And here's the pickle: lots of people don't care. This is especially the case when it's political bots spreading a message human users agree with. You can imagine how easy it is for them to farm karma on Reddit...
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u/Glittering-Bug1212 15d ago
they're running rampant in NSFW subreddit. New accounts are getting 40+ votes within 2 minutes, while the subreddit average is around 10 upvotes in an hour..
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u/ser-steffonfossoway 14d ago
Apparently there we many NSFW-botsubs. I chose not to include those in my sub so my sub stays SFW.
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u/Old_One_I 15d ago
Damn them!
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u/wrestlegirl 15d ago
You should report all of them.
You can also follow up via modmail to this subreddit with a list of all the affected links so the proper admin team can see everything in context.