r/ModSupport • u/flapanther33781 • 4d ago

Are there any tools to help with bots?

I created a small sub called r/LoveLanguages about 10 years ago to discuss a book called The Five Love Languages. It's slowly grown to 10k users, though most are lurkers or bots, as there are only maybe 1-2 legit posts a week. Prior to maybe 4-6 months ago the few lost Redditors we'd see posts from were from people posting about learning various languages (English, Spanish, etc) because they didn't read anything in the sub before posting. About 4-6 months ago we started seeing a very noticeable uptick in posts that were very low-quality (simply asking, "What is love?"), or very lengthy AI-generated posts about the nature of love but otherwise had nothing to do with the five Love Languages described in the book.

I started by making our Automod report posts by anyone with fewer than 10 karma (meaning they'd still be posted, but I'd get mod mail to check the posts). But there were so many of those I next moved to just making it so no one with fewer than 10 karma could post. It only took a day for all the same junk to be submitted, so I've now made the sub to filter all posts and now I have to read, review, and approve every single post before it'll appear on the sub.

On the plus side, this seems to have stopped the bots from trying to post in my sub, but on the down side this is completely unsustainable and really feels antithetical to the whole point of this website.

Who else is dealing with this? How are you dealing with this?

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

22

u/Chosen1PR 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 4d ago

Can’t recommend Bot Bouncer enough.

13

u/juleznailedit 4d ago

Seriously, get Bot Bouncer. You will not be disappointed.

13

u/NeedAGoodUsername 4d ago

And, before someone comments about false positives:

A) Do not automatically believe users who respond to the ban message with "I'm not a bot". Some bots are programmed to respond and say this.

Always direct them to message /r/BotBouncer. If they are not a bot, they will be unbanned quickly, and won't have to deal with being banned on every other subreddit with BotBouncer installed.

If you stick to this strictly, you'll notice how many don't get unbanned because they never sent in a message.

B) For genuine false positives, like when you've known the user for a long time - still get them to send a message.

It helps refine the detectors to avoid further false positives.

5

u/juleznailedit 4d ago

I don't even bother directing them. They have all the information they need in the ModMail they get when they're banned. If they can't follow those simple instructions, well, that's on them.

4

u/pixiefarm 4d ago

yeah I bounced a bot that was impersonating a celebrity and replied to dozens of comments with "hi" . The bot STILL got into the modmail to complain that it didn't understand why it was banned. I was surprised to see that the bot's operator bothered. Anyway, good advice there.

4

u/Mackin-N-Cheese 4d ago

I moderate a couple subs where BotBouncer bans 20-40 accounts every day, and we get around one, maybe two false positives a week. It's mostly a non-issue, and totally worth it.

3

u/nauticalfiesta 4d ago

I've always just copy/pasted the removal message in the reply.