MSP Anti-Abuse Team Weekly Report #1

Anti-Abuse Team Weekly Report #1

Friday - September 1st - 2017

Starting today, I will be doing a weekly prune of accounts on Discord that have not logged on in 30 days or more, and have not received a Role of any sort. This will help us to keep a better eye on the level of activity the community is seeing. I ran the initial prune last week, removing 888 accounts from the server that were simple dead weight. We will now set a mark in the sand this week with the current stats, and track from there.

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

• 4686 Members before this week's prune was run.
• 30 Day Prune has removed 324 dead accounts.
• This leaves our count at 4362 Members after the prune.
• ~400 Concurrent users online at 10:30 EST (We believe this will be a better metric for our community going forward.)

More are joining, even as I write this post. With the upcoming change to the Steemit.com Welcome page that will show us as a link under Other Resources, we expect to start gaining members much faster. We are hoping to stay lean and effective during this with efforts like this Prune feature built into Discord.

Today marked a great day to start tracking the rest of the statistics as well.

A short time ago, I found an ongoing effort to register and prepare 19 accounts for the use of the upvote bot here. They clearly belonged to a single person. Upon investigating the names, I found that this individual has actually done this before. I immediately recognized the names involved when I dug into their transfer history for more info, they were from an operation we removed last month.

On the left, the previous group of names totaling 17 accounts. On the right is the group of names I dealt with today, 19 in total.

The lead account this time appears to be @yoile, where you can find the Transfer history, as well as transfers that connect that account to the previous attempts. Thankfully, as we recently suffered an outage on our Discord bot for @minnowsupport, they were unable to get any upvotes this time. Last time when we caught him, we were forced to remove 187 upvotes manually from their posts.

I want to note, that the last time we found this individual, it was due to a partnership with @steemcleaners and the people there. They came to us and brought to our attention the string of plagiarized and spammy posts from the first 17 accounts. We are happy to be working so closely with them, and I have brought to their attention the new list of accounts to look over their posts, as they are likely much more of the same.

So with that recent successful sleuthing, we have...

Updated stats on Bans and Blacklist:

• 460 bans on Discord as of dealing with this most recent attempt to abuse the bots.
• 221 accounts in total are now Blacklisted and unable to receive an upvote from @minnowsupport.

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In summary:

We will continue our efforts to keep the Minnow Support Project a place where everyone can get fair and equal support from the community and it's upvote bots. Stay tuned for more information next week, were we will start to see if there is any progress from this new initiative.

If you have any questions, please contact me on MSP or MSP-Probation

Thanks -

Discordiant

MSP Moderator and Anti-Abuse Team Leader

_{Proud Moderator and supporter of the Minnow Support Project - Brought to you by:}

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