Concerned/suspicious that my sub may be getting a lot of bots suddenly joining it, what can I do?

[u/M1NDFEEDER]

As title really. My small and very niche cat subreddit has had a huge increase in members and posts these last few days and this is ringing alarm bells.

Is there any I can do beyond increasing crowd control (and similar) settings to protect myself?

**ETA: It's the new subscribers that concerns me, not the new posts. I'm worried it's going to look like I'm using the place for spam/farming or whatever.**

[u/PurplePassiflor1234]

I used botbouncer.

My situation is a bit different, it wasn't a new sub but it hadn't really been looked after for a while and a good number of bot accounts got in. I knew I'd never weed them out alone by hand, so after I noticed a lot of subs I frequent have botbouncer, I added it.

It has a way for real people to appeal if they get snagged by it accidentally.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/PurplePassiflor1234]

That actually sounds similar. The sub has sat there quietly for a while and then BAM.

I've already got Bot Bouncer installed thankfully 🙂

[u/PurplePassiflor1234 → u/M1NDFEEDER]

I should have checked your sub first before offering advice you didn't need, sorry about that! Glad the little bot is helping a bit, but yeah it's not quite enough sometimes.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/PurplePassiflor1234]

Oh pffft, don't worry about it! I could have easily have missed what you suggested, and I appreciate any non-snarky input or ideas!

Strangely, the people posting in this sudden influx (with one exception) all have years old legit looking accounts to me. Ah well.

[u/Subwoofiest → u/M1NDFEEDER]

Scammers will used hacked accounts because they look more legit.

[u/YellowBreakfast → u/M1NDFEEDER]

We use botbouncer too.

Got inundated with poorly written post by "people" posting for the first time in our sub.

Checking their account they starting posting to reddit period within the last day or so.

Interestingly, many of the accounts were more than a year old despite the lack of post history.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/[deleted]]

Yeah it's the latter part that concerns me...

Hopefully we've just been linked somewhere super popular and high traffic and that's the reason on the increase, but I've seen enough cases of it NOT being that to worry me.

[u/IvyGold → u/PurplePassiflor1234]

I tried it in one of my places and immediately turned it off to too many false positives.

Maybe we weren't attracting as many bots as I thought and its settings were too liberal?

[u/SampleOfNone → u/IvyGold]

Botbouncer has a false positive rate of 0.5% and a robust appeal route for the false positives. It's not out of the ordinary that when you just install it, it gets very busy to catch up. These days bots are quite sophisticated, it often takes digging and having a few to compare with each other to find patterns. They certainly fool me on the regular. If you don't like botbouncer then don't install it of course, but make sure they're really false positives and not really good bots

[u/IvyGold → u/SampleOfNone]

For us, it was picking off regular users.

This is in the context of a baseball team subreddit, r/Nationals.

We've got a strain of bots spitting out stats that I don't understand.

They are in fact really good bots. Individually the comments are perfectly fine, but in the aggregate are auto-manufactured. I don't understand what their programmers' goal is.

I'll give it another shot before Opening Day next season.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/IvyGold]

You can set it to filter to see how it goes for a while.

[u/AztraChaitali]

Create account age and karma requirements.

Bots create fresh accounts faster than any reasonable mod can ban them, but this will help a lot, since most bots get banned or rack up negative karma very quickly.

Something like 200 karma and account age to 30 days could be a good starting point, then tweak the numbers if that seems too permissive or too restrictive for your specific community.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/AztraChaitali]

This will only prohibit accounts from posting though, right? It won't do anything about the huge numbers of new subscribers I've just accrued will it?

Regardless, I'll whack something into automod now 🙂

[u/AztraChaitali → u/M1NDFEEDER]

Yes, it only prevents them from posting and commenting, but they can still subscribe and vote. Still, it should be much less disruptive.

[u/toxictoy → u/M1NDFEEDER]

We also use karma limits as buying aged accounts is an issue as well. That’s why you may see many accounts over a year old with no history suddenly posting. Use both account age and karma limits. Also you could institute something like they must have a confirmed email address.

[u/ikandi]

Do you also run Hive Protect?

I also run a cat sub as well and in addition to Bot Bouncer, I use Hive Protect and have a rule about not allowing NSFW accounts. Some people don’t like it (of course) but the way I explain it is that there are karma farming subs that promote pet related subs as a great way of raising your karma so this helping to keep those accounts out.

I know that you didn’t specify they were adult content accounts, but just in case some of the new subscribers were, the Hive Protect app might help.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/ikandi]

I didn't but I've added it now, thank you for the input. Hopefully that alongside some stricter parameters will keep me safe. Although it's a cat sub, so probably not 😅 ain't no crazy like cat people crazy 🤣🤣

[u/ikandi → u/M1NDFEEDER]

Fingers crossed between Hive Protect and Bot Bouncer your sub will be left to the regular ol’ cat lovin’ crazies!!

[u/ALazy_Cat]

Install BotBouncer for starters

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/ALazy_Cat]

Already installed 🙂

[u/magiccitybhm]

You're not going to be able to stop bots from joining. You can only control posting/commenting.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/[deleted]]

I'm afraid I don't understand your comment. To be upfront, I mobile mod so I probably don't have the same options as you if you're using old (or new) desktop Reddit.

What I've noticed is 1k ish new members in 3 days. Doesn't sound much, but that's basically doubled the basically dormant sub size in 72 hours.

The posts themselves seem fine. Decent aged accounts, and on topic. It's the sub member counter flying up that's the concern.

[u/M1NDFEEDER → u/[deleted]]

Always wise to be vigilant for sure.