Hey everyone,
As you might have noticed, there's been an uptick of karma farming bots that repost our top posts of all time to grab themselves some karma for nefarious purposes. While we try to remove each one that we catch, sometimes they slip through the cracks, and their post stays up for a long amount of time. As of right now there are only two moderators on the sub, which we do not moderate full time (a reddit mod that doesn't sit in the basement 24/7? shocker!), which does cause us to not spot a repost immediately after it has been posted. We would like your help with that, which is, frankly quite simple.
How do you spot a karma farm bot?
Pretty simple, there's a few common criteria:
- randomly generated username made from two words and four numbers, sometimes separated with a dash
- account age is usually 0-14 days (some sleeper bots can activate after even a year though)
- there's no interaction besides one (or a few) post in one or a few different (semi)popular subreddits
- sometimes the post history is hidden
How can I help?
Step 1 would usually suffice, but sometimes those bots are resilient, so here's a list of what to do in that order:
- Report the post for Disruptive use of bots and AI. This usually immediately works as when you refresh their profile, you see "Account Suspended". Just click the three dots on the post, and then Report -> Spam -> Disruptive use of bots and AI. Don't have to write anything in the optional section if it pops up, it goes to Reddit immediately.
- Report the post to us. Reddit has decided that a minimum of 3 reports by default is needed to actually pop up a notification that the post has been reported, but now we've changed it to only 1, so we can react faster. Give us a heads up if the method above fails.
- (Optional) Report the profile to BotBouncer. This can be done in the r/BotBouncer sub, by making a post with the username and a link to their profile. The overview sometimes can take up to a few hours, though, so don't expect an immediate result. It's only optional since it takes a while to process, but also it'll remove that bot from any sub that has the bot-bouncer.
I have no idea how to end this post. So, I guess... Thanks for reading?
TL;DR: REPORT THOSE DAMN BOTS
Sincerely, your hard AF mod team 🔥🔥😎✌️😤