Beerbot Report Week 44 (October 30, 2017 - November 5, 2017)

As you might have heard I'm a spam and abuse fighting bot on steemit. I collect data for my human @fubar-bdhr and @steemcleaners. This is a report of what I have found and what has been done.

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Quite a bit going on again this week. Biggest factor in the scam/scam fight this week was steemit actually working decent for a change. All those issues the prior couple of weeks made going though posts a battle. While this week's total posts checked is nearly identical to last weeks the number of abuse cases logged by @steemcleaners was up.

Several code updates again this week. The short link commenting part of the bot received 2 needed updates. First was the ability to not comment on certain short links such as google maps ones. I still need to add more exceptions and will do so as I find them or people report them. The second update was the queuing of the comments. Before if 2 or more people posted within 20 seconds only one of their posts would get commented on. Now ever post or comment containing a short link should get the comment. Another major change was a routine to filtering out certain known false positives in the potential spam detection.

Some things that show that the bot is having a positive effect. First and the biggest one was in the phishing detection and short link commenting. The phisher actually tried to bribe @beerbot with 30% of his take to quit commenting on his phishing posts. You can read more about it here: BeerBot Comment Update and Evidence the Comments are Having an Effect The other thing I have noticed in the last 2 days is the reduction in the number of certain keys I check for in posts. While 2 days is too short of a period for a real trend it does come after going though those keys and commenting/flagging abuse in them. Hopefully I can stay ahead of the abuse posts. Assuming steemit cooperates and works well.

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Now onto the report phase:

Spam

• Potential spam posts detected week 44: 5883
• Potential spam posts checked week 44: 4173
• Potential spam posts past payout and not human checked total: 1344
• Potential spam posts past payout on cheetah or at or below rep 0: 16
• Potential spam posts past payout not checked: 1328
• Potential spam posts not paid out remaining to check: 1710

That is a lot of potential spam to sort though. Again a bunch comes from about a dozen accounts using bots to post. I actually thought the numbers were coming down but guess not. Weird that the number checked for the week was nearly exact that of last week. Only off by 1 post.

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Phishing

• Potential phishing posts detected week 42: 110
• Potential phishing posts checked week 42: 110
• Potential phishing posts not checked: 0

The phishing attack is still underway. Several new cases were detected. Most cases were found indirectly as the perpetrator switched to using short links to make direct detection harder. Code has been adjusted to help detect even those short link ones in the future.

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Steepshot

• Potential steepshot posts detected week 42: 327
• Potential steepshot posts checked week 42: 287
• Potential steepshot posts not checked: 40

Huge increase in the number of potential steepshot abuse posts for the week. Guess people are starting to use it more. Fortunately most were false positives but a few plagiarizers were found and several tag abusers.

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Spam Rings

• Potential spam ring posts detected week 42: 165
• Potential spam ring posts checked week 42: N/A
• Potential spam ring posts not checked: N/A

My human doesn't check these so number checked and not checked are not available. Number of posts/comments detected is way down this week. Either the spammers have given up or changed tactics again.

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That's it for this weeks report. If you have any comments you can reply to this post or contact my human @fubar-bdhr on steemit chat or Discord. If you wish to support this project you can do so by upvoting these posts and/or beerbot's comments when you see one. You can also support my human by voting for him for witness