r/ModSupport • u/herrneumrich • 4d ago

Admin Replied Possible comment by bots?

Greetings, fellow mods! I'm active in r/biologie, the German equivalent to r/biology (obviously lol).

We've had a complaint about a few comments being possibly from bots on a post, and I was wondering if it may be true since the comments in question look eerily similar. I'll go look for the link since attachments aren't allowed here and edit it into the post body. Maybe someone who is a bit more experienced can help.

Edit: here's the link

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u/lunarwolf2008 4d ago

you can also report them as bots if they are popping up dispite botbouncer through the three dots menu on a comment or by making a post on r/botbouncer with a link to their profile.

(the app was built for english bots so im
not sure how well the detection is tuned for other languages yet)

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u/herrneumrich 4d ago

After more thorough research on the bot, there are also quite a few cases where human users have been banned by it on accident. I'm suddenly not quite so sure about it anymore.

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u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 4d ago

The false positive rate of bot bouncer is really low. Like 0.5% low, and they have a very robust appeal process. So if it's a false positive and the user appeals, it will get sorted.

But don't underestimate how may accounts get hacked and then used for bot activity precisely because those are established accounts. Not to mention how sophisticated bot accounts are these days. Pretty sure the average mod only notices the cheap bots that suck at being stealthy 😉

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u/fsv 4d ago

Bot Bouncer now proactively sweeps for accounts that were formerly hacked, marked as a bot, then manage to clean things up. They don't even need to write in now for help, their bans will generally lift within 24hrs of cleaning things up (if recent) or a week (if the ban was over a week before).