Announcing: Minnow Support Project Anti-Abuse Team
Recently, an initiative to cut back on the abuse of the @minnowsupport upvote bot was started among the leadership team.
As we have gotten new tools in place to help track down and identify people abusing the $upvote command, we decided it was time to move forward with the Anti-Abuse Team.
This team of sorts, being led by me, is intended to help return the value to the free upvote available to all members of the Minnow Support Project. We watch for abuse of the bots that might lower the value of the upvotes this service offers for free.
First, let's cover what we consider abuse of the bots:
- Any method that may allow an individual steemit account to repeatedly receive more than a single @minnowsupport upvote inside the 12 hour cool-down.
- Any use of multiple accounts, all receiving their own upvote, but owned by a single individual.
- Repeated use of the bots to upvote spam, plagiarism, or copy/paste content.
All of these present an unfair distribution of what is a FREE upvote from a bot with a considerable amount of SP delegated to it by the community. This would be unfair even if it came from one person, but with everyone chipping in to help, it is worse. It would be wrong to have any one member of the community get more than any other through nefarious means.
We want people free to show support to any member.
This means that we will do our best to identify when a member is getting more $upvote uses towards their posts for valid reasons. We want you to feel free to use your cool-down to help someone else. Just try not to always aim it at the same person, as this will be considered abuse. Spread the love, help everyone get a boost from this wonderful bot of ours.
How can you help us identify this type of abuse, or others?
We have an 'msp-abuse' channel in Discord for just this purpose. If you see something that is out of the ordinary, or posts getting upvotes when you don't think they are worthy, drop us a line. Please be sure to explain what you have found, rather than just dumping a link in there.
We use that channel as our points of contact with @steemcleaners and other similar groups, so it will be seen not just by us, but others as well.
You can also message me on Discord. (I promise I chose this username long before Discord was a thing, it bears no relation.)
Now, what do we do about abuse when it's found?
So what do we do when we first detect possible abuse of our bots? We investigate.
Please do not think we just ban you from Discord, and blacklist you from the bot blindly. We do check on it. I won't go into details how, as it could serve as a road-map for how to avoid detection, but it is very thorough.
Then, depending on what we see, we decide what to do.
If it seems like there may be a valid reason for it, we contact the users in question. We ask them what is going on, and use their responses versus what we have found as a way to determine the intent of the users.
If it is a blatant violation of our rules about having a single Discord account, or there is a clear connection between the SteemIt accounts, we will ban the users in question from Discord, and place the SteemIt accounts on a blacklist (@minnowsupport mutes them, so their content can't be seen/upvoted by any automated means).
This generally covers most of the situations we run into, but there have been specific situations regard plagiarism, copy/paste or low-quality content causing different reactions.
Keep in mind that any Moderator for MSP can remove an upvote from a post by setting it to 0%. You will get a comment on the post stating that it has been changed to 0% as well.
What can you do to earn your way back in?
So, you might have been banned from Discord and want to speak to me or another member of the Anti-Abuse team about your situation?
How do you reach us, as Direct Messages on Discord are blocked unless a server is shared?
We have created today a Discord server for just this purpose. I will provide the link here, and it will be where anyone who has been banned will be sent.
There, we can discuss the nature of the abuse that was found to be done.
If there is a possibility of returning you to the server, we will discuss that in detail. We want to help all the Minnows grow and become the best Steemians they can be.
To this end, we are usually able to allow you back into the community. Though, you may not gain access to the upvote bot for some time. We work this out on an case by case basis.
In summary, if you screw up and decide to try and get more than you were allowed to out of our community, we will find you. If you decide you really want to get back in, you now know where to find us for discussion.
Stay posted too, I will be posting weekly updates on the progress, statistics, and developments regarding the Anti-Abuse Team.
If you have any questions, please contact me on MSP or MSP-Probation
Thanks -
Discordiant
MSP Moderator and Anti-Abuse Team Leader
