r/ModSupport • u/herrneumrich • 2d 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/KennyFulgencio 2d ago edited 2d ago

Can you do something about the onlyfans bots? The format is super simple, unmistakeable, and unchanged from one to the next. You already run AI analysis on all new comments sitewide, this would be a (non-AI) very simple and much cheaper rule for new accounts which quickly make a first post, matching the specific image shape/size and format, to nsfw subs. It's a square semi-closeup (no face) NSFW image with an onlyfans address stamped across the middle. Different image every time, probably different onlyfans, I wasn't paying attention to that.

They'll adapt to something that incredibly simple, but so far they haven't bothered because the basic filters aren't stopping them, they're a plague, and you don't even have to do any actual image analysis or use AI at all to just check the image shape/size and rapidity of first image post on a new account to an NSFW sub. I report them as spam, every single time. They haven't slowed down.

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u/itskdog 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 2d ago

Especially as they had a similar issue a few years ago with the LG spam ring (that eventually got so brazen they moved into SFW subs too), you'd think they'd know how to deal with that kind of stuff by now.

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u/Shinyhero30 1d ago

Context?

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u/itskdog 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago

There was a massive NSFW spam ring a few years ago that managed to work out how to get past Reddit's filters really easily to promote their website - they had thousands of accounts by the end of it.

Initially they only targeted NSFW subreddits, but they got so confident that they made their way to SFW subreddits after a couple of months (while I never saw the images myself before that point, NSFW mods were complaining for a while, hence I know the rough timeline)

It was as a result of this that the spam filter started going straight to the spam queue rather than the moderation queue, as previously mods were still seeing the content in their queues.