MSP Anti-Abuse Team Weekly Report #12

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Anti-Abuse Team Weekly Report #12

Saturday - November 25th - 2017

A day late, but making up for it. The delay due to the US shopping holiday and Thanksgiving means, now that I have recovered from a food-coma, we have a bunch of stuff to announce to make up for it. I will get to the updates in a moment, but first, the stats.

Wait til you see this...

The details of this weeks prune of the member-list -

5166 Members before this week's prune was run. (216 new accounts since last week)
30 Day Prune has removed 132 dead accounts. (13 more were removed this Prune.)
This leaves our count at 5034 Members after the prune.
~510 Concurrent users online at 15:00 EST (I suspect the holidays are going to hold back growth in this number for a while.)

Updated stats on Bans and Blacklist -

1115 Discord bans (+68 new from previous)
739 accounts in total are now Blacklisted by @minnowsupport (+136 from previous!)

In summary:

Huge week for the Blacklist.

We have finally started to get a real handle on spotting and stopping multiple-account abusers of our bot, so we move on to the next problem.

After discovering a huge ring of what we officially call 'low-content-quality posters' all using the same bid-bot (@aomura) as well as our bots, we decided to make this the week we start our mission to clean up the trash that use our bots at least. At least 47 accounts have been found, identified as being either made by a single person or by a concerted effort from a small group somewhere, have been Blacklisted and banned from PALnet. A simple examination of their posting habits, profile pages, and ubiquitous use of the @aomura and @tayyabbhussain bid-bots, it became clear they were unhealthy for the platform. I have passed along the names to other services and hope to see some action taken. I can provide the list upon request, just find me in PALnet and toss me a DM.

They weren't the only ones, in the first day of this new initiative we added 75+ of the now 136 new Blacklisted users. Cue the epic battle music, cry havoc, etc.

This brings us to the next important thing.

Consider yourself warned.

We will be going on the hunt through our bot's upvotes, checking content as it comes to our attention. If you aren't adding value to the platform, you are sucking it dry. You are also lowering the reward out free upvote bot needs to help out the real quality new users. This will no longer stand. Up your game, or find the freebies elsewhere. We are glad to have you be a part of PALnet and learn what it can take to post quality work. Please, come discuss it with us.

If you have come here for freebies, and want to maximize your profit for little effort, we will find you.

Things that will get you blacklisted (I plan to release a more detailed post about this later):

A single image or even multiple images, with very little text or only a basic bit of information with it.
An embedded DTube video with zero additions to the post that provide value.
Attempting to gain multiple upvotes outside our 1 per 12 hour cool-down by any means.
Any major violation of our community guidelines and rules. (This usually has to do with treatment of other users on the platform.)

If you want to keep using our bot @minnowsupport, take note of these.

**To help this be done easily, and quickly, we have new tools. **

We now have a new Discord bot that allows any member of Leadership to not only add to the Blacklist, but to also pull all unpaid votes by @minnowsupport. With the upcoming post on what we will consider 'low-quality-content' and the other reasons for gaining the Blacklist, we will be having all the Leadership team able to identify issues, and quickly handle them.

The Silence will fall.

Thanks to our favorite behind-the-scenes developer, @danielsaori. You have created a monster, and we love it.