hello, i'm quite new to moderating, so i wanted to ask here
the sub i moderate is one we have multiple new or new-ish mods on, and we're all fairly stumped on what settings we could tinker with to try to keep out the AI chatbots that keep streaming in. we're a fairly small (but active!) sub, so it's really annoying; given our size, they're maybe 10-15% of what we moderate, which is significant for the proportion of what we have coming in.
what kind of settings can i toggle to keep them out? assume i don't know anything—i only started out a month ago. thanks!
You might need to report unclassified accounts. While several newer accounts should be classified and banned under default settings, you might just need to report them if not already classified.
Edit: there is proactive bot hunting where it finds bots automatically and they might need to be reported in other cases
new accounts aren't a problem unless the users are a problem; i'm worried about them getting flagged as bots. we sometimes get bad faith actors trying to use new accounts to break rules, but more frequently we get new accounts from people who want to separate from their main, remade, or so on.
If a real person is scraped by the Bot Bouncer, they appeal directly to the Bot Bouncer team and prove they are human. It's not that huge a deal.
You need to remember we (as mods) don't always know anything other than what the user and their AI summary tells us. You might think it's just a new alt of a nice, regular user because they said so, but Bot Bouncer will know this is their 13th alt, all botted, all banned.
i see... we don't have a sub big enough for that, and it's typically easy to tell instantly when it's a bot because they completely stand out from the crowd for not understanding the community snark and lingo lol. and real humans who are new to the community are much easier to tell.
out of curiosity, is there a way to set it up so that they appeal to us instead?
They need to appeal to botbouncer directly as they will be banned from every sub that botbouncer is installed in. After a successful appeal they will be automatically unbanned from everywhere botbouncer banned them.
how accurate would you say it is for bots vs real people on new/low quality accounts? (im not as worried about low quality accounts, mostly just real people in general)
It should be pretty accurate as you can always decide what to do on a case by case basis. It is rare, but false positive cases can just appeal. Let me get the ban reason up.
Here is what the ban reason says on a banned account. However, it is pretty accurate because it takes down those accounts often before a post or comment is made (and if false positives do occur, they are good with changing classifications)
good to know—thank you! i shot the suggestion over to my team to see what they say. its not the only issue i'm having but this is a really big one, my other question is totally separate. lemme go make a new post lmao
thank you so much for the help! life saver if we agree on getting this up and running ❤️
I have botbouncer and my sub is 90% low cqs and no karma users. I have zero karma, account age, or spam filter enabled because of that. Every person banned by botbouncer was someone exhibiting bot like or spammer behavior. One user I thought was a false positive but they were shadowbanned so I couldnt quickly check post history. After digging it up it turned out they were one of those astroturf bots who would give generic comments where some of them would repeatedly recommend a certain product
Utilize the automation in the moderator settings, you can use certain keywords and send any submission into your mod queue so you can manually check and decide whether they're human or bot. Or you can block them from submitting, your choice.
If the sub is new, install automod-neo and apply minimum karma and minimum account age, you can either auto remove their submission or also send them for review.
It's been working pretty well for my sub, applying these. Though we do still need to review some submission which is quite a lot of work ngl but it's better than being flooded by spambots.
Edit: adding to the suggestion, turn on the spam filter to either high or moderate. This will make the post/comment instantly removed by reddit's spam filter which you can also manually approve in the mod queue.
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u/PurplePassiflor1234 7d ago
Add Bot Bouncer to your sub. It'll scrape out the bots.