Honey Pots are coming! Get ready to help fight spam and earn doing so!
We will be rolling out a system to attempt to trap and identify spammers on steemit! The system is fairly simple and we will roll it out as a setting for all users. How it works is simple:
Every day a randomly selected group of Shadow Casters will generate a post automatically. There will be 2 kinds of posts, each time your account is selected it will randomly choose which type.
Comment Honey Pot (CHP)
When your account is selected to generate a CHP, ShadowBot will generate a post informing humans very clearly what it is. It will indicate that it is for catching bot spam and that up voting will help you! It will also make it very clear DO NOT REPLY OR COMMENT on this post or you WILL BE FLAGGED AS A SPAMMER! People who see these posts may chose to upvote you for helping the community fight spam!
Upvote Honey Pot (UHP)
When your account is selected to generate a UHP, ShadowBot will generate a post informing humans very clearly what it is. It will indicate that you should NOT UP VOTE THIS POST.
Using a combination of CHP and UHP across many accounts we believe will allows us to trap bots into our web, identify them, and add them to a special list for all to see!
ShadowBot will monitor CHPs and UHPs it generates for all members for violations of the terms (No Commenting or No Voting). Those who violate the terms will get points, and enough points will lead to a blacklisting. This is very much inline with how email honeypots work!
UPDATE
CHPs and UHPs will be ignored by the Shadow Queue. This will not unfairly create posts that then lead to free up votes from ShadowBot and it's Casters!
If anyone has any input we are still developing this and would love the feedback!!
This is an excellent idea! Hopefully by the time a few bots become smart enough to track and ignore these 'honey pots,' we catch them all :)
Plan is to have a few levels as well, non harmful, abusive, and out right SCAM AVOID. This way we can identify bots who are friendly, bots who are slightly abusive but not really harmful, and those who are blatantly scamming and promoting fraud! This will tie into our reporting system we have been working on the last 2 months!
now that is one clever idea :) There's a lot of spammers and amateur-made bots out there
So as a user I just do nothing?
When we open this feature up it will be a setting you will be able to toggle inside your account.
Thanks shadowbot, you are my only friend.
ShadowBot Doesn't do what ShadowBot Does for ShadowBot..
ShadowBot Does what ShadowBot Does because ShadowBot is ShadowBot!
We are totally speaking the same language here Shadowbot.
Project's Codename Winnie The Pooh ;) Get it because he likes honey pots haha #cornyjoke
Does that make me Christoper Robin?
As long as we get to be James James Cameron The Greatest Pioneer!
Great idea,I will wait to see how that is going to effectively work.
great initiative @shadowbot,
ive recently joined and think your service with the ranking system helps support the system reward good authors and discourage abuse and the honey pot will only add to this.
would be nice if you had a discord server to have information resources and ease of direct contact for any who might be interested in learning about what you offer.
We are rolling out our own steemit crypto based chat that will work on top of your steemit account in accordance with the whitepaper's design for memos.
interesting sounds like a great development for the platform
have you considered posting your projects through @utopian-io?
Will this be a problem for autovote set using steemvoter.com and curation trails ? Steem voter is an excellent to tool cast our votes to the authors who consistently create quality contents and I believe many are using it.
Great question. No we will be sure to have a whitelist of known good bots. Most bots require some form of input from you to get the up vote (either paying or messaging them or tagging them). This should ensure, most, but not all bots will have no issue at all since we will be creating these posts specifically for our traps. For bots that auto-upvote ALL posts, they will need to work with us to ensure their system is whitelisted. NONE of this will be initially used to blacklist anyone, we are simply creating a framework for now. All the issues will be worked out long before it ever becomes used widespread for filtering if it ever does!
ALSO, the more feedback we gather, the more we are seeing, the spam comments are really the issue, spam voting is FAR harder to solve and FAR less of a problem!
I agree, spam comments are annoying. Looking forward to see this framework working to make Steem a better place to share.
i am on shadowbot, yesterday i changed settings to follow back people who follow me, and i changed that shadowbot could vote up from me. But this morning when i first checked my feed and than my blog, i discovered that my blog page was full of resteemed stuff !! is this done by shadowbot?? I directly changed my settings again, because that is so horrible ! I do not know if it is shadowbot, but that is the only thing i did change. I feel like a spammer now. i did not resteem any of this.
That could not be caused by the setting for auto follow back. Re-steeming is a completely separate system.
i changed my settings back and see if it makes a change. I do not know how come it did this, i do not even find my own posts anymore.
Auto Follow Back has no effect on re-steeming. The resteem threshold is the only setting that controls that feature. Turning it to off disables the feature which is the default setting and is what I see for your account.
where can i find this resteem treshold?
It is under your account settings tab. We are looking into this issue now and have turned off the functionality completely until we can identify if the issue was user error or a software bug.
i have to do some work now, but i hope you still will let me know, thank you ever so much for sorting out if it can be caused by that.
Is it possible you set the re-steem threshold setting to something other than "Off"? That is the only setting that controls the re-steem feature.
We can't duplicate the issue without directly setting the "Resteem Threshold" by accident. What browser are you using? Maybe we can look at that.
We have completely disabled auto-resteem feature until we can identify if/what is causing the issue.
thank you !! it is weird is it not? do you advice me to change pasword maybe ? or do you really think it is from a wrong setting somewhere?
Good initiative @shadowbot
Thank you, we hope it helps to reduce some of the spam proliferating on steemit!
You mean in your project or do you mean “Honeypots are coming to condenser?”
Bots do not post/upvote via the interface as such honeypots on Steemit/condenser are merely a UX failure rather than a well-designed solution. And if they were, they would just go via any interface app.
I am not quite sure what you mean by condenser but our system will be to catch bots that solely exist to spam comments and/or up vote in a spam like method. We are looking for feedback for exactly how we will be rolling this system out.
The interface? I presume you mean steemit.com. All posts are stored on the blockchain as are all votes and comments. Our honey pot posts will very easily tell human beings either not to comment or not to post on that post. If someone does comment or post on them, it is obvious it was a bot not a human being, which is how a honeypot works. Easy for a human to avoid but a trap for a bot.
So you will be rolling out a system which operates on Blockchain level? Or just on Steemit.com (which is the condenser app/interface to the Steem Blockchain).
If the former, how will you operate without a HF because if a bot/spammer submits to a node your system isn’t implemented on it has lost its use already. If your system will operate (solely) on steemit, then it needs to go in the condenser interface which is the front-end on steemit.
I understand what a honeypot is, I just fail to see on what level your honeypot will function: Blockchain or front-end interface.
Or maybe, what you actually mean, is that it will operate within the realm of shadowbot [only]?
It will operate on the blockchain looking specifically at posts we generate automatically. If I make a post and say "DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS POST" and you see 10 comments "Nice post" "Wow awesome". those are spam bots just trying to earn rewards from commenting useless crap! I don't see how it is hard to monitor the blockchain for a post the system created and see if someone violates the post's instructions IE DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS POST.. Condenser app has no bearing on how this will work and is just an interface (wallet) to the blockchain.
Alright then. I’m going to follow this, I’m too interested to see how that will function. Especially without integration by all witness, this is a decentralised ledger after all.
The witnesses have nothing to do with creating a post and monitoring if someone commented on it. The process is the same as embedding an email like [email protected] anywhere on the internet you can then monitoring WHO sends to it ;)
Send an email there and you get on my email blacklist. I didn't need a witness to do that.. Watch i'll get emails to that account now and they'll get blacklisted..
If you have any input we are still designing this out and need the feedback! Thanks for sharing!
To clarify this is NOT something condensor OR steemit is doing, this is something WE are making that we hope will help identify spammers and get some lists going that we may be able to use in the future. We are not going to initially use the list to do anything other than share it with others to use as they see fit.
I get it now. I was thinking the honeypot would be at a different level. But basically, you are going to set traps by adding more noise to the noise.
What do you think will be the conversion rate? How many of those comments will actually be found by bots. Without using catching techniques such as tag abuse and specific keywords.
Not sure it is still in experiment mode really came out of an idea a few of us had about addressing the bots that are the most annoying, no vote and leave comments seconds after at the top trying to get up votes with something like "Wow so nice post!".
This will be an ongoing evolving idea, but the idea could help us at least identify people who are abusing the system. This will also tie into our internal reporting system which we are also developing internally. The hope is that IF we can build something even halfway useful others may join in and build on top to expand the idea to really help the community!
Every member of ShadowBot will be able to generate these traps which will hopefully allow us to identify some of the abusers of steemit!
Thanks for the input really hope you stick around, you seem very knowledgeable and we really appreciate all the input!
IF it turns out to be a great idea, it may land up being something witnesses want to integrate upstream in the future. But I feel just like email, this is going to have to be a protocol built on top. Like DKIM, SPF and DMARC combined with blacklists, we will have to build lists initially until the protocols either are changed OR the systems (condensor) built on top support them.
I agree with a protocol, which is why I asked where the honeypot would be integrated. But it should be between submission to and the ledger. So on witness, on blockchain, level.
Which means a HF.
Otherwise I fear that this is a very well-meant initiative but the conversion (statistical chance of positives) is too low. And of course the MO is defeat automated comments by means of an automated comment/message but that shouldn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive.
But as said, I’m going to keep an eye on this because I’m very curious about this.
Yes see my comment about @bigdeej's discovery for how we can store CUSTOM_JSON for ANYTHING we want on the blockchain without any change to witness code: https://steemd.com/tx/ca52211257da3f47980e38dc50246fe174eb196f
We feel in the beginning the posts can be fairly simple. But as we progress bots will begin to attempt to detect these types of posts. Part of the system will be tied into our reporting system which allows users to report posts/comments without having to use their VP to down vote. This also creates a flat voting system whereby each account gets the same weight (SP does not matter). This should help prevent abuse in the long run as we tie in our spam filtering. We have a very well trained spam filter for email we believe we can slightly modify the input for to pipe in comments and posts from steemit. Again this is all in the testing/experimenting phase, but the idea seems plausible!
Also we found we can store CUSTOM_JSON on the blockchain so we can actually publish these lists and results to the blockchain without any modification to any witness code. @bigdeeej proved this last week when he stored the current Bitcoin price on the steemit blockchain inside a custom_json request: https://steemd.com/tx/ca52211257da3f47980e38dc50246fe174eb196f
I love the idea and will certainly participate. I am kind of curious what consequences being on the blacklist would have for a spammer though...
On a side tangent, I was wanting to ask why the Shadow ranks haven't been recalculated in a quite a while. I don't really know if I'd jump up that much, but I seemed to have joined at the exact wrong time as the ranks have been unchanged for almost a month now. I love the concept of Shadow Bot, but it seems to me not adjusting the ranks could lead to unfair allotments.
In the beginning it would only be a list that people could decide to use in their own applications. Going forward as we develop the system others may choose to integrate the lists into their own systems/apps.
Shadow Ranks are calculated over a 7 day period and re-adjust once per week.
Oh thanks. I noticed you used to post when it happened in the news on your site, but I hadn't seen it in a while so sounds like your just not posting as opposed to not adjusting. And I just noticed my rank changed so I'm just going to say thank you and stop asking silly questions.
Sorry for the confusion, those 2 updates were manual bumps we had to do in order to roll out the new release. You should receive notifications in your account each week for your Shadow Rank changes going forward!