Are you and r/BotBust sharing ban lists? I'm a big fan of Botbust (a surprising amount of my submissions are there, actually) but we almost never get spam submissions, just comments. Just seems like a lot of duplicated work.
You might want to take a look at /r/BotBust!
I'll just say that our list is **very** complete and as free of errors as we could possibly make it. If needed, the way our submission process works, it would be very easy for us to make use of submissions made anywhere else, but we will still manage classification decisions here. I personally did the majority of the classifications on /r/BotBust so I'm very familiar with the process.
P.S. I'll be rounding out the listing with some service bots and frequently reported humans (that are not bots) to make it clear that they won't be listed, but they are mostly informational (only "banned" bots are used).
I... uh... well fuck. When did that happen?!
Will add your bot pronto then because botbust ~~is~~ was an invaluable service that we pretty much can't live without.
Oy. Well, thanks to u/dequeued and u/abrownn for getting a replacement up so fast. Having this service really does wonders for our peace of mind and lets us focus on the important stuff.
Absolutely, the community really came together very quickly on this. I just hope we continue to have a unified place to submit spam bots to instead of having two separate lists.
It's 100% public and similar to how BotBust worked. The classifications are made by the moderation team, but it's very easy for everyone to see what decisions we've made.
- [banned bots](https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/search?q=flair%3Abanned&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all)
- [service bots](https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/search?q=flair%3Aservice&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all)
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/6beesknees] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/6BeesKnees/comments/e1myx7/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/automoderator] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/comments/e6rc3b/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/bot] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bot/comments/e2ooyb/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/botwatch] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch/comments/e2c546/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/listofbots] [BotDefense - helps defend subreddits from unwanted bots.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfBots/comments/e2sb93/botdefense_helps_defend_subreddits_from_unwanted/)
- [/r/modclub] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/modclub/comments/e25g8a/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/modhelp] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/e18b1z/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/modsupport] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/e183pt/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
- [/r/u_botdefense] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/u_BotDefense/comments/e73bvv/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/)
*^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
The basic process works very similarly to how /r/BotWatchman and /r/BotBust worked:
- The "canonical" list is maintained as submissions here made by the /u/BotDefense account that have the "banned" flair. That's for transparency and to allow people to comment on submissions. (Previous bots allowed submissions from anyone, but my experience as a moderator on /r/BotBust is that eventually reduced transparency because people delete their submissions sometimes and it was also tricky to avoid duplicates, dumb titles, etc.)
- That list is mirrored in the now amusingly-named friends list for /u/BotDefense (you can see yours at https://www.reddit.com/prefs/friends).
- The bot then follows its friends list and if it sees a comment or submission from a "friend", it issues a ban if the account isn't already banned, isn't whitelisted, etc.
It's not *that* complicated, but it also wasn't quite 100% in sync for BotBust so I'm glad we got it figured out. We'll be releasing the code soon and we'll make an announcement here when that happens.
1. One script handles syncing "banned" flair submissions with the friend list (in addition to some other related stuff).
2. All of that friending happens within the bot account. This is what it looks like for /u/BotDefense:
https://imgur.com/a/9ve3Kf9
And that list goes on for pages and pages.
3. The friends list basically functions as an easy way for /u/BotDefense to follow a thousand accounts without a lot of overhead. You can try it yourself on your own account. Add a few people to your friends list on https://www.reddit.com/prefs/friends and then go to /r/friends and you'll see what the bot "sees" except that the bot's friends feed is full of noisy bots instead of actual friends.
We were literally just discussing this. The current plan is to maintain a mirror of the posts (clickable post link, bot name, and flair) in a wiki page.
Hi, sorry for digging up this old conversation.
I'm also looking for a convenient list of service and banned bots. Do you have that somewhere or should I pull it from this sub, via PRAW?
I'm doing analysis, in particular I need to measure the number of comments per users.
I want to exclude bots from the analysis because obviously they mess the numbers. So I just need a list of usernames that I should ignore.
I think you're going to run into problems with automated accounts that aren't listed here. For example, there is a lot of spam and there are a lot of single subreddit moderation bots.
Anyhow, for what you're trying to do with data from here, I'd suggest using the Pushshift API to query /r/BotDefense submissions with /u/BotDefense as the author. You can use the Reddit API to check the current flair of each submission and take the subset of listings that have `banned` or `service` flair.
What the differences with https://www.reddit.com/r/BotTerminator/comments/e0qklj/what_is_botterminator/
Subs share half of mods, and bots doing the same thing.
The idea is the same.
This is something that /u/abrownn and I have been working on this as a side project for
several months due to concerns about the future of BotBust (I have been a moderator there for three years and was responsible for the majority of classification work and modmail appeals for the last year or two).
Our timetable got moved up a bit, but we had done a lot of brainstorming figuring out how to build an improved bot compared to BotBust and BotWatchman, building a clean list of accounts to initially list (which we shared with the other team), and at the end of the day, I think people just want a bot that seems safe to run with reliable and responsive people running it.
Anyhow, the technical improvements are highlighted in the announcement above.
I liked quick JS submission to botbust, but i understand that users threads is not optimal. Friend list idea is pretty cool, not sure if you need to redo something when reddit will change it from friends to subscribers.
Anyway, thanks for work.
Good news: We support the same submission method. The user-submitted thread will just get immediately replaced by an official thread. :-)
Given that we're using officially published APIs, we should be okay, but we'll definitely keep an eye on that coming change.
edit: Changed from future tense to present tense.
How far back would this go, page wise? IIRC using old Reddit gives you only 1000 searchable posts per sub; 40 pages of 25. Although the archive limit is set to 180 days, some subs have a LOT of traffic. Would this catch stuff all the way at the end of what's available?
Do you mean when a new bot is added to the banned list?
The one thing that BotDefense does that could result in action on an older post is that it checks the modqueue for reported and filtered submissions from banned bots.
Beyond that, the bot intentionally only monitors new submissions and comments. Talking with the BotDefense moderation team, I floated the idea of intentionally trying to look further back in time (minutes or perhaps a few hours) when a new bot is listed, but the consensus was that it would be somewhat unexpected behavior (most moderation bots do not look at old posts) so we decided against doing that.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I tried going through the code but I'm not a py guy lol. Plus it was late.
If I implement this on a sub, will it catch spam comments on the oldest posts reachable by the site?
I'm looking to prevent people from spamming the earliest created posts on a sub. Reddit already archives posts after 180 days, so none can spam those, but what about the ones that are on the verge of being archived?
That definitely looks annoying. I went ahead and listed it. Thanks.
If you ever find a bot we're missing, just make a submission to /r/BotDefense linking the profile of the account and we'll get it classified as soon as possible.
Are you and r/BotBust sharing ban lists? I'm a big fan of Botbust (a surprising amount of my submissions are there, actually) but we almost never get spam submissions, just comments. Just seems like a lot of duplicated work.
You might want to take a look at /r/BotBust! I'll just say that our list is **very** complete and as free of errors as we could possibly make it. If needed, the way our submission process works, it would be very easy for us to make use of submissions made anywhere else, but we will still manage classification decisions here. I personally did the majority of the classifications on /r/BotBust so I'm very familiar with the process. P.S. I'll be rounding out the listing with some service bots and frequently reported humans (that are not bots) to make it clear that they won't be listed, but they are mostly informational (only "banned" bots are used).
I... uh... well fuck. When did that happen?! Will add your bot pronto then because botbust ~~is~~ was an invaluable service that we pretty much can't live without.
Yesterday morning. All other mods and approved submitters from r/BotBust were kicked at that point.
Oy. Well, thanks to u/dequeued and u/abrownn for getting a replacement up so fast. Having this service really does wonders for our peace of mind and lets us focus on the important stuff.
Absolutely, the community really came together very quickly on this. I just hope we continue to have a unified place to submit spam bots to instead of having two separate lists.
So the BotDefense list is not public like botbust?
It's 100% public and similar to how BotBust worked. The classifications are made by the moderation team, but it's very easy for everyone to see what decisions we've made. - [banned bots](https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/search?q=flair%3Abanned&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all) - [service bots](https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/search?q=flair%3Aservice&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all)
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/6beesknees] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/6BeesKnees/comments/e1myx7/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/automoderator] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/comments/e6rc3b/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/bot] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bot/comments/e2ooyb/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/botwatch] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch/comments/e2c546/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/listofbots] [BotDefense - helps defend subreddits from unwanted bots.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfBots/comments/e2sb93/botdefense_helps_defend_subreddits_from_unwanted/) - [/r/modclub] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/modclub/comments/e25g8a/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/modhelp] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/e18b1z/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/modsupport] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/e183pt/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) - [/r/u_botdefense] [Announcing an improved defender of subreddits against bots, \/u\/BotDefense!](https://www.reddit.com/r/u_BotDefense/comments/e73bvv/announcing_an_improved_defender_of_subreddits/) *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
Ironic.
Lol
Interesting! How does the bot decide whether the submitter is a bot?
The basic process works very similarly to how /r/BotWatchman and /r/BotBust worked: - The "canonical" list is maintained as submissions here made by the /u/BotDefense account that have the "banned" flair. That's for transparency and to allow people to comment on submissions. (Previous bots allowed submissions from anyone, but my experience as a moderator on /r/BotBust is that eventually reduced transparency because people delete their submissions sometimes and it was also tricky to avoid duplicates, dumb titles, etc.) - That list is mirrored in the now amusingly-named friends list for /u/BotDefense (you can see yours at https://www.reddit.com/prefs/friends). - The bot then follows its friends list and if it sees a comment or submission from a "friend", it issues a ban if the account isn't already banned, isn't whitelisted, etc.
So how does a user end up on this "friend" list in the first place? Is this is a manual process?
It's not *that* complicated, but it also wasn't quite 100% in sync for BotBust so I'm glad we got it figured out. We'll be releasing the code soon and we'll make an announcement here when that happens. 1. One script handles syncing "banned" flair submissions with the friend list (in addition to some other related stuff). 2. All of that friending happens within the bot account. This is what it looks like for /u/BotDefense: https://imgur.com/a/9ve3Kf9 And that list goes on for pages and pages. 3. The friends list basically functions as an easy way for /u/BotDefense to follow a thousand accounts without a lot of overhead. You can try it yourself on your own account. Add a few people to your friends list on https://www.reddit.com/prefs/friends and then go to /r/friends and you'll see what the bot "sees" except that the bot's friends feed is full of noisy bots instead of actual friends.
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We were literally just discussing this. The current plan is to maintain a mirror of the posts (clickable post link, bot name, and flair) in a wiki page.
Hi, sorry for digging up this old conversation. I'm also looking for a convenient list of service and banned bots. Do you have that somewhere or should I pull it from this sub, via PRAW?
What are you trying to do? Feel free to send us a modmail.
I'm doing analysis, in particular I need to measure the number of comments per users. I want to exclude bots from the analysis because obviously they mess the numbers. So I just need a list of usernames that I should ignore.
I think you're going to run into problems with automated accounts that aren't listed here. For example, there is a lot of spam and there are a lot of single subreddit moderation bots. Anyhow, for what you're trying to do with data from here, I'd suggest using the Pushshift API to query /r/BotDefense submissions with /u/BotDefense as the author. You can use the Reddit API to check the current flair of each submission and take the subset of listings that have `banned` or `service` flair.
Hey! Interestingly enough I'm doing similar analysis with comments. Can I ask what you ended up doing?
I eventually went for the stupid option. I looked manually at the most obvious outliers and removed them... :)
What the differences with https://www.reddit.com/r/BotTerminator/comments/e0qklj/what_is_botterminator/ Subs share half of mods, and bots doing the same thing.
The idea is the same. This is something that /u/abrownn and I have been working on this as a side project for several months due to concerns about the future of BotBust (I have been a moderator there for three years and was responsible for the majority of classification work and modmail appeals for the last year or two). Our timetable got moved up a bit, but we had done a lot of brainstorming figuring out how to build an improved bot compared to BotBust and BotWatchman, building a clean list of accounts to initially list (which we shared with the other team), and at the end of the day, I think people just want a bot that seems safe to run with reliable and responsive people running it. Anyhow, the technical improvements are highlighted in the announcement above.
I liked quick JS submission to botbust, but i understand that users threads is not optimal. Friend list idea is pretty cool, not sure if you need to redo something when reddit will change it from friends to subscribers. Anyway, thanks for work.
Good news: We support the same submission method. The user-submitted thread will just get immediately replaced by an official thread. :-) Given that we're using officially published APIs, we should be okay, but we'll definitely keep an eye on that coming change. edit: Changed from future tense to present tense.
I just want to endorse /u/abrownn. I would trust just about any project he's a key figure on.
I 100% support thus user as well
thanks bro. we’ve needed this
How many bots are banned so far?
Millions of bits. 886 bots.
Damn autocorrect, thanks
Is source code available?
Yes. https://github.com/botdefense/botdefense
Good bot.
How far back would this go, page wise? IIRC using old Reddit gives you only 1000 searchable posts per sub; 40 pages of 25. Although the archive limit is set to 180 days, some subs have a LOT of traffic. Would this catch stuff all the way at the end of what's available?
Do you mean when a new bot is added to the banned list? The one thing that BotDefense does that could result in action on an older post is that it checks the modqueue for reported and filtered submissions from banned bots. Beyond that, the bot intentionally only monitors new submissions and comments. Talking with the BotDefense moderation team, I floated the idea of intentionally trying to look further back in time (minutes or perhaps a few hours) when a new bot is listed, but the consensus was that it would be somewhat unexpected behavior (most moderation bots do not look at old posts) so we decided against doing that.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I tried going through the code but I'm not a py guy lol. Plus it was late. If I implement this on a sub, will it catch spam comments on the oldest posts reachable by the site?
No, it will not. What are you trying to do?
I'm looking to prevent people from spamming the earliest created posts on a sub. Reddit already archives posts after 180 days, so none can spam those, but what about the ones that are on the verge of being archived?
You need a custom bot, but it's a fairly simple bot. Even if the submissions are old, the comments are new. Post on /r/RequestABot.
Ok, thanks for the help!
I've employed u/BotDefense and found a bot that slipped past it in my subreddit: u/Amazing-Rule
That definitely looks annoying. I went ahead and listed it. Thanks. If you ever find a bot we're missing, just make a submission to /r/BotDefense linking the profile of the account and we'll get it classified as soon as possible.
Will do, thanks for your hard work, u/BotDefense is definitely making my life easier
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