Spam users?

What’s the take on seemingly throwaway accounts being created, writing a very badly formatted review with a 5-star rating that gives the impression of being copy-pasted, and then vanishing from the face of the earth?

This came to my attention when I saw it happen back-to-back in quick succession a little while back, but I decided to wait and see if there would be any further acitvity on said accounts to warrant their legitimacy. Creating this topic now because there hasn’t been any such activity.

The really low effort approach makes it seem like an attempt to drive up scores and shill said games, rather than having so much genuine enthusiasm that they felt like creating an account just to post a review expressing their love for that one single game, and then leaving forever as their mission had been fulfilled.

Are rating bots/spammers like this dealt with in any particular manner? Also, I can post those 2 particular usernames if requested, but I’m guessing for the most part they’re not picked up on manually.

I was able to let @Peter know and they took care of a specific instance relatively quickly. You can always flag any comments they say as well to expedite a response.

Just PM me the users you’re talking about. For the most part, this rarely happens, and it doesn’t seem like it makes much of an impact on scores that I can tell. I haven’t really banned or deleted anyone for shilling games too many times. I do bring the hammer down on people that are racist/sexist/phobic pretty hard. Thankfully that doesn’t happen all that often either.

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What was particularly interesting with these cases were that they seemed to be written by the same person, despite being on two separate newly created accounts. They were posted very close in time as well. There’s a risk this will be a growing problem as the site grows. I know MAL has their fair share of issues with this kind of stuff.

I have PM’d you the users. I see the flag option here on the forums, but I’m not able to locate any on the main site.

@peter has the ability to flag statuses been removed?

Well, statuses never had flags, only comments, and those don’t do a whole lot right this second. It’s very high on my priority list to get flags working 100% the way they should. I’m assuming you’re talking about the dumb sex status from earlier today? PM the status you’re talking about and I’ll look at it. I’ve removed some dumb stuff this week already.

Ah ok, for some reason I thought you could. Not the sexy one, people trolling Last of Us 2 crap. Will send a PM.

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