F*** Spammers

[u/worstnerd]

Hey everyone,

We know that things have been challenging on the spam front over the last few months. Our NSFW communities have been particularly impacted by the recent wave of leakgirls spam on the platform. This is so frustrating. Especially for mods and admins. While it may be hard to see the work happening behind the scenes, we are taking this seriously and have been working on shutting them down as quickly as possible.

We’ve shared this before, and this particular spammer continues to be adept at detecting what we are doing to shut it down and finding workarounds. This means that there are no simple solutions. When we shut it down in one way, we find that they quickly evolve and find new avenues. We have reached a point where we can “quickly” detect the new campaigns, but quickly may be something on the order of hours… and at the volume of this actor, hours can feel like a lifetime for mods, and lead to mucked up mod queues and large volumes of garbage. We are actively working on new tooling that will help us shrink this time from hours to hopefully minutes, but those tools take time to build. Additionally, while new tooling will be helpful, we always know that a persistent attacker will find ways to circumvent.

To shed more light on our efforts, please see the graph below for a sense of the volume that we are talking about. For content manipulation in general (spam and vote manipulation), we received shy of 7.5M reports and we banned nearly 37M accounts between January and March of this year. This is a chart for leakgirls spam alone:

Number of leakgirls accounts banned each week

While we don’t have a clear, definite timeline on when this will be fully addressed, the reality of spam is that it is ever-evolving. As we improve our existing tooling and build new ones, our efforts will get progressively better, but it won't happen overnight. We know that this is a major load on mods. I hope you all know that I personally appreciate it, and more importantly your communities appreciate it.

Please know that we are here working alongside you on this. Your reports and, yes, even your removals, help us find any new signals when this group shifts tactics please keep them coming! We share your frustration and are doing our best to lighten the load. We share regular reports in r/redditsecurity discussing these types of issues (recent post), I’d encourage you all to subscribe. I will try to be a bit more active in this channel where I can be helpful, and our wonderful Community team is ever-present here to convey what we are doing, and let us know your pain points so I can help my Safety team (who are also great at what they do) prioritize where we can be most effective.

Thank you for all you do, and f*** the spammers!

[u/redtaboo]

As an aside, one of our teams is in the process of making some modqueue improvements for you. This afternoon we're making a change aimed at relieving some of the impact on you. It will take a bit to get through to all communities, so hang tight. Moving forward, posts removed by our spam filter will be automatically moved to the spam listing, rather than your main mod queue. This means that future incidents will not clog up your modqueue.

Important note: content filtered by Automod will still appear in the standard modqueue as they do today. Let us know what you think here!

[u/[deleted]]

you can say fuck on the internet

[u/worstnerd → u/[deleted]]

I wear crocs and a cardigan...I'm basically a modern day Mr. Rogers

[u/waluigithewalrus → u/[deleted]]

This is a Christian internet, no fucking swearing!

[u/LG03]

Why not take one of the most basic measures that's been in use for decades on ancient internet forums?

Require email verification.

Every single one of the accounts that hit my subs was an unverified account less than a day old. You guys allow this level of spam at the most basic level by making it trivial to generate and use accounts in large numbers.

[u/worstnerd → u/LG03]

I hear you, but the reality is that spammers always find a way. We have spammers that use legit verified email address. We have spammers that highjack compromised accounts with verified email (and no 2fa…please use 2fa). There are no silver bullets

[u/Halaku]

This might be me talking out my bum, but can't Reddit set up a system where if X number of posts in Y timeframe is spamming domain Z, domain Z is blacklisted until an employee can look at it personally?

If I'm reading the chart correctly, y'all were at over half a million leakgirl accounts banned in the first two weeks of May alone. If leakgirls.com was added to the sitewide blacklist once a certain criteria was reached, no one else would have encountered leakgirls spam from mid-May onward, and all the bots would have been just screaming into the Void until such time as Reddit could decide if leakgirls content would be allowed again.

[u/worstnerd → u/Halaku]

No, this is a very good question. You are absolutely right about some spam mitigation techniques (and we do some fancy versions of what you are talking about). That is pretty effective for your run of the mill spammers. However, this particular spammer hides URLs in images, uses many many unique URLs, leverages redirects through well known (and hence unbannable) domains. They are not just posting links to leakgirls, they are tricking users into going there.

[u/ScamWatchReporter → u/Halaku]

When it's coming from 1000 accounts over 10k subreddit with links buried in images and Unicode, it's not so cut and dry. This guy has multiple active phishing campaign to steal accounts and makes about 1000 accounts a day

[u/djscsi]

Hello,

As someone who has spent seriously way too much time tracking and reporting "these fucking accounts" - especially over the last month - here are some pain points and/or suggestions:

#1 Very helpful thing would be for your team to provide some kind of internally-recognized report reasons/keywords that reporters can use to categorize/flag spam accounts. For example, I'm sure your team internally has some way that you tag leakgirls spam specifically. When someone includes "leakgirls" in their report reason, something probably detects that and uses that as an elevated signal for your spam detection systems. When I make a spam report that says "karma farming bot" it probably just goes into the void? For all I know, your systems are just ignoring my reports because I'm reporting 50+ accounts every day. Give us something that the "spam fighters" can use to signal your systems. Give us some way to actually do something to help - you have a small army of free, dedicated spam trackers who are wasting hours of their time posting reports to /dev/null , many of whom have given up and developed their own third-party tools to detect and fight this spam without any help from reddit. Reddit has even been making it progressively harder to submit reports, I assume intentionally - it's extremely frustrating.

#2 Seriously, just nuke all of the "crypto pumping" subreddits. These subs are responsible for the vast majority of the current wave of karma farming / repost accounts that are infesting absolutely every type of subreddit right now. Go look at CryptoMoonShots, CryptoMarsShots, shitcoinpotential, shitcoinmoonshots, SatoshiStreetDegens, etc etc. and you will see that every other post and comment is from an account like pgolleBdfghry2356 or dkasakast45676 or drezetzdfdgdfg , all predictably aged accounts that spent a few days predictably running a karma farming script before predictably turning into crypto spammers. Aside from the fact that all this pump & dump activity is probably illegal, why is there no repercussion for any of this? It's not like they are taking any measures to obscure what they're doing - it's all out in the open. At this point I kinda have to assume that reddit has analyzed this activity and decided it's not actually a problem, maybe because these bots generate tons of awards/clicks/engagement, many making it to r/all ... Still depressing to see such a significant % of posts/comments from bots. Not to mention when these bots repost someone else's "my dog died" post from last year and get tons of karma/awards, only for the person whose dog actually died to see the post. Imagine how that feels.

#3 There is a particularly insidious type of script that copy/pastes posts from smaller/niche communities (hobby, technical, professional, etc.) that is causing tons of unsuspecting well-meaning people to waste hours of time writing out thoughtful and in-depth replies to bots who will never read them and will just auto-delete the post after a few hours. IMO this is far more damaging to the fabric of the community than the typical karma farming bots that just repost last year's popular posts on popular subreddits. I made a post about it with some examples here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/o6id82/some_particularly_insidious_bots/ It's great that you're fighting the leakgirls spam (really), but I think the stuff I'm talking about here is far more damaging to reddit than the occasional porn image that makes it through into r/CuteCatMemes .

I could write more but I feel l like this is all kind of a waste of time anyway - I am probably just hanging onto some nostalgic feeling of what reddit used to be. But I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyway thanks for letting us vent.

edit: Awesome, thanks for reaching out and asking for input and then not responding to anyone. This is the 3rd or 4th time I've written up a super long post to staff, trying to be thoughtful and constructive, and got no acknowledgement anyone even read it. Very encouraging! 🙄

[u/hansjens47 → u/djscsi]

This is the 3rd or 4th time I've written up a super long post to staff, trying to be thoughtful and constructive, and got no acknowledgement anyone even read it. Very encouraging!

Par for the course, sadly.

The admins don't seem to be redditors or use reddit, so they can tick a box saying "we hald a Q&A about this" for the higher ups and that's the end of that.

Must be a nightmare to work at reddit with that quality of management.

[u/yoweigh → u/djscsi]

Yikes. 16 days and no response to the most highly upvoted comment in this thread. It seems like the admins are more interested in autofellating themselves than providing any sort of actual ModSupport. Leakgirls aren't a big problem in my >1 million sub compared to everything else. I've only seen a small handful of them. The admin's problems and the mods' problems aren't the same, usually.

[u/ScamWatchReporter]

Make it harder to create accounts. It's way too easy

[u/KennyFulgencio → u/ScamWatchReporter]

The ease of creating accounts was perhaps the primary focus of reddit's conception and philosophy, making it as effortless as possible to gain and retain new contributing users. It made sense for a brand new site. It wouldn't hurt to revisit that philosophy now, on an absolutely huge site overstuffed with bad-faith account creators (I'm sure they're still a minority, but large enough for a significant impact on the site).

[u/SiruX21]

I find it funny these spammers even target r/GeForceNOW, a subreddit for some video games lol. Our new account filter though almost always catches the posts so that's good

[u/Femilip]

Thank you for recognizing it is a problem. r/Orlando (lol?) Got hit by massive NSFW spam the other day and it was....Something.

[u/ThaddeusJP]

37M accounts between January and March of this year.

so 89 days..... 415,700 accounts a day? You're banning, on avg 415k accounts a DAY?

THAT IS INSANE

[u/Kvothealar]

As someone who moderates two different NON NSFW subs that are both targeted by these NSFW bots for some reason, thank you.

[u/gives-out-hugs]

I know at least two instances where i followed the pastes to the final site it was a mega download for an exe file which i examined in a sandbox to find it did in fact download images, but also a miner that ran in the background

it would be interesting to find out if the bots are all using the same proxies to connect and if pressure could be put upon those service providers to stop handling those customers

black hole them, go after them from every step of the way, alert the service providers you find and if they don't do anything, reddit stops accepting traffic from those providers, cutting off ALL of their customers

[u/mbeck810]

u/redtaboo

I created a bot that is relatively successful at removing the leakgirls spam. Unfortunately, the rules are very specific to our subreddit and use some statistical evaluation.

However, I see one way how to strike a strong blow to the spammers: make the automod more powerful. Admins have to set the rules that are valid globally, but particular subreddits can fight spam in a more tailored way.

Not every community has moderators that could develop their own bot, but custom bots could be partially replaced if the automod is more versatile. For example, one of the automod conditions is the number of reports, but it cannot be filtered by the type of the reports. I can imagine that smaller subreddits could set a lower threshold for removals if they can bind it directly to the spam reports. If there are more options the moderators could contribute to the joint effort to fight the spammers.

[u/UnacceptableUse]

I'm very surprised how far this guy has taken this. Considering how incredibly easy it was to find his details online I'm surprised reddit has not taken this as a legal matter yet

[u/furrythrowawayaccoun]

Our subreddit has /model/ in the name (but isn't related to fashion models) and oh boyy, did I enjoy waking up to 50 spam or hwat

[u/chopsuwe]

Content removed in protest of Reddit treatment of users, moderators, the visually impaired community and 3rd party app developers.

If you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks: Reddit abruptly announced they would be charging astronomically overpriced API fees to 3rd party apps, cutting off mod tools. Worse, blind redditors & blind mods (including mods of r/Blind and similar communities) will no longer have access to resources that are desperately needed in the disabled community.

Removal of 3rd party apps

Moderators all across Reddit rely on third party apps to keep subreddit safe from spam, scammers and to keep the subs on topic. Despite Reddit’s very public claim that "moderation tools will not be impacted", this could not be further from the truth despite 5+ years of promises from Reddit. Toolbox in particular is a browser extension that adds a huge amount of moderation features that quite simply do not exist on any version of Reddit - mobile, desktop (new) or desktop (old). Without Toolbox, the ability to moderate efficiently is gone. Toolbox is effectively dead.

All of the current 3rd party apps are either closing or will not be updated. With less moderation you will see more spam (OnlyFans, crypto, etc.) and more low quality content. Your casual experience will be hindered.

[u/StormTheParade]

just wanted to say thank you and the other admins for the work they're putting in for this issue. I've noticed the spam traffic dying down in my subreddit and honestly it's a relief.

[u/BlatantConservative]

Is this an update solely about leakgirls spammers, or are you also referring to the NameName types which have been reposting content and comments and then selling those accounts?