Introduction

Introducing ‘The Spaminators’! Our team has recently been formed to help mitigate the enormous amount of spam that has descended upon steemit.com. As they say - “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it!”

We realize that no one wants there to be a need for such a team in our community but the numerous botnets that are attempting to leach rewards from bot commenting has gotten seriously out of control. 'Human' comment spammers have also joined the fray.

At last count there were over 5,500 accounts involved in various bot-driven reward-sucking activity. An AI bot, @sadkitten is being developed to detect these bot spammers. Currently the little kitten has been on overdrive attempting to flag these botnets that @spaminator and others feed her. Personally, I think she’s gotten a little fat!

One AI kitten can’t do it all alone, so Steemians have stepped forward to help Steemit return to a relatively normal state (whatever that is), without these vast botnets making Steemit their virtual home and denigrating Steem.

Even with all our volunteers we cannot do it all. We need support from the community. Part of what we will do is enlist the help of the community. We will be creating posts that both educate the community on the problem and how the community can help today to deter this behavior. We'll also give you advice on what not to do.

What to Tackle First

The Bots

Elaborate botnet comment/upvote farms that are clearly abusing this platform They will be handled using human & scripted bot actions. They are simply too vast at this point for to be dealt with by humans alone.

Human Spammers

So many new people have arrived and they simply don’t know what to do. Some don’t take the time to look around and get the lay of the land. They see someone doing something and they mimic it. New users may not realize that the 'real' @dollarvigilante is writing posts on Steemit and it isn't someone copying & pasting articles from dollarvigilante.com. They see spam comments and comment bots getting upvotes and think it’s accepted by the community. On an individual level one or two copy/paste posts, single html link posts, misusing tags, and spam comments don't create a lot of spam. When we have hundreds or thousands of accounts performing these actions it turns into a larger spam problem. There is no landing page that gives them community guidelines.

Reporting & Communication

Communication is key. If someone is doing something that you think is plagiarism or spam commenting, please tell them what they are doing wrong. If you don’t want to personally comment or fear retaliation you can leave a link to the abuse in #steemcleaners-linkdrop. @spaminator will be working with the members of @steemcleaners.

@spaminator will concentrate on working from the 'top down'. We intend to identify and take action against the most prolific spammers first. @steemcleaners will still be accepting reports of individuals the community identifies.

Members, Supporters, & Friends

We have many talented Steemians onboard and we each have different skills.

Many of you know @patrice from her work as part of @steemcleaners. She will be leading the team, dispensing advice and organizing data.

If you find something rather complex and suspicious, it’s best to reach out to our good friend @sherlockholmes because he’s a Steem detective and is good at unraveling mysteries.

We can't leave out @sadkitten among our list of friends and supporters. If we keep feeding her spam she may grow up to be as big as @cheetah one day!

Members, supporters, & friends of 'The Spaminators' may attempt to remain anonymous if they so choose.

The Spaminator's Logo Contest

We have decided to hold a Spaminator logo art contest!

CALLING ALL ARTISTS:

PRIZE: 25 SBD, 25 STEEM and 25% SBD of this payout.

Create a logo for THE SPAMINATORS

Since we are a diverse group of people, I think a team logo would be best. The more absurd, the better… remember, paint us like superheros fighting spam! Get creative. And don’t forget to include a kitty as our trusted kittybot, flagging abusers while we sleep. You're welcome to add cheetah as well. I have a feeling we'll be feeding these two kitty cats a lot of spam!

Those wishing to participate should create a post tagged with #spaminator-logo and place a link in the comments below. Submissions must be posted by Friday August 25th at Midnight UTC. The members of @spaminator will choose their favorite from those submitted. If we can’t decide we’ll post our picks for the community to vote on.

Thanks for the support!