Bots

I noticed something peculiar under the Birthdays section today. These are bot accounts, and there may be a lot more than this.

They haven't done any harm yet, but I know from running a site of my own that these lay dormant for a while and then can start spamming in the future, sometimes in a less obvious but more insidious way where they make a passable response using AI but stick links into their posts and/or signature.

I'm curious how you identify them as bots? I think you are correct about 4 of them, but one appears to be an active member.

Ah, that was just me being lazy about cropping that one out. If you click here, there appear to be more than those 4, and I speculate that there are a lot more than this.

https://www.dolldreaming.com/calendar/2023/4/4/?show=birthdays

They're bots because they all follow the same unnatural name pattern based on abbreviated real names, same birthday but spread out the signup dates to avoid detection. This is a really amateur attempt honestly since they didn't even randomize the ending number to a birth year.

Edited April 4, 2023 by chef_mai

1 hour ago, chef_mai said:

They're bots because they all follow the same unnatural name pattern based on abbreviated real names, same birthday but spread out the signup dates to avoid detection.

Ok, that's what I saw in them but was thrown by the inclusion of the other member. I saw a few more elements when I looked at them and from those elements it's pretty clear that they are not real members. 

I kind of wonder what purpose those bots have (well otherwise than just spamming shady links) like I don’t think they will get much millage out of a doll forum which pretty much requires you to be a real person. Like on Twitter or any social media site it makes more “sense” but yea.

They're probably being made by whichever Dollfie won that ToHeart 2 robomaid outfit I was bidding on last month 😆.

Seriously though, I had a go at running a few forums over the years and bots were a nightmare. They also register for one of my websites and they're a real nuisance.

They also have a dubious link under their ‘about me’ page. 

I was going to make a thread about this, but since this one exists I’ll just post here.

Is there any way to report members?

I’ve reported their stupid posts in the past hoping the mods would notice and ban the user, but several are still signed up on this site and another signed up today but hasn’t posted yet so I can’t report them (@newzealandescortspage). It’s so obvious they’re bots because they link to crap that’s inappropriate and frankly offensive.

If you report the item as SPAM, the mods have an option for "flag as spammer", and that option removes the post and locks the account. Only @Averis can actually delete the account. 

For a lot of things, it is helpful to have members report what they notice, and reporting something by itself isn't going to harm anyone; we do use judgement before acting on something. 
 

If an account has nothing to "report" you could post a status update on their profile and then report that. Just keep the status update clean, but if it's an obvious spammer, posting "this is spam" and reporting it would be fine. You could PM us too, but I think reports are a good record of why we inflicted a penalty or restriction on a member. 

We did get the report, but that account was already flagged as a spammer. Flagging won't remove or hide them, but they are blocked and I removed the escort link from their profile.