Chasing @trafalgar

Following @sapwood's recent list of plagiatists/spammers, @steemcurator01 commented:

Interesting how many of these spammers/plagiarists get massive votes from the same account.

The clue as to who the big account was is in this post title.

It's fair to say that I notice stuff. I'm inquisitive and curious as to why things happen the way they do. I seek to understand, to learn. So when I saw @trafalgar upvote what appeared to be innocuous diary game entries, I became curious. This, accompanied by the lack of response to a plagiarism upvote helped me quickly realise that @trafalgar had left the platform some time ago, and was using a bot to upvote content. So with the way my brain works, I saw a challenge that needed solving.

I've refrained from posting this until now because I didn't want to encourage people to chase the upvotes, now that @trafalgar's delegated his power and stopped upvoting, I can post without fear that twice a day, even more people will spam the fuck out of steemit like they have done and totally ruin it for the rest of us.

So if you've seen repeated diary game entries, posts appear, disappear, only to reappear 15 minutes later, or artwork and photography appear every 15 minutes, this is why.

Some people were better than others, most had got lucky once, and blindly spammed, deleted, respammed until they got what they were looking for. That precious $70 upvote and the multiple "follow-bots" to top it up.

This, @steemcurator01, is the reason behind those upvotes.

Now I could sit here and tell you some of the secrets behind @trafalgar's algorithm (which required some serious data crunching and a bit of initiative), but through fear that the upvotes will restart, I'll refrain from doing so. There are clues scattered around his posts and from what I've read in these posts, he'd be pretty pissed off to see the abuse that his upvoting bot has created - the success of Steemit is at the core of his bot, along with a sense of humour that I truly appreciate (@trafalgar - if you do ever read this, I'm pretty sure you know what I'm referring to).

So readers, if you see people fucking about with their posts, posting, deleting, spamming, reposting, respamming and generally being a dick with their content, let them know the trafalgar-bot is no more and that they can stop now.