If you can't post a comment, you were banned. If you can, you were shilled.

This is a thing? Damn...they will try anything lmao

Shills larping as mods lol

I hope this gets some traction. There are a SHIT TON of bot accounts, stealthily made accounts made in mega batches, and accounts that appear to be "older" accounts but have a super low post number, and probably a good mix of accounts that are radioactive if you catch my drift. A lot of these accounts are put into long term storage or rotated out of reserve for when another account gets nuked or banned. I don't care about the internet points tally aside from one reason, it does help to differentiate to some extent as to who is real and who isn't, but not always.

SO before some knucklehead gets their undies in a bunch, this doesn't apply to every new account or the so-called "lurker" accounts that rarely if ever post/comment, and honestly are rare in and of themselves, use your brain accordingly, after all that is why you are here.

If you have been paying attention to the interaction in threads over the last year, you can pretty easily. Here are a few signs to spot the fake/fraud/troublemaker/bot/batch accounts....

A lot of these account names are generated from a script in the same way names are generated by docker for temporary container names. There is a pool of names, typically 3-4 as I can tell and they are thrown together in some "cute" phrase, so you wind up with an account name made from 3-4 words stuck together. These accounts are very rarely a single name as it is a PITA to script a one word name generator that isn't gibberish and makes sense or has some kind of meaning/connotation.

These accounts will be following the same formula will try and be provocative, either by the 3 word phrase or have a foul word joined in the mix.

Another action which is common, and how they bypass the handshake classification, is to have 3 or more of these accounts commenting in a thread one of them started, and they will all upvote each other to get around the limitation. This typically happens with threads in the "new" category. Coupling in to this technique, if you pay attention to many threads lately, you will have the same procedure where they will comment and upvote each other and assumedly have accounts in reserve to upvote the thread to get the in the first 2-3 pages of the "hot" section, this same practice was and is still done today by morons on reddit. These same accounts will try to steer and concern troll a good thread to knock it off course.

Ever look at a response by someone and see a 1-2yr old account with zero posts and a response count less than 500(being generous)?

Wonder why a quality post gets downvoted, all those same accounts downvote?
Wonder why you have a thread with any bible references that has responses that are utterly garbage, and pretty much straight from wikipedia or r/athiest?

Do you part folks, if an account looks sketchy, report it, don't ignore it. The quality of late isn't what it used to be. Repeats of the same stories, repeats of something that was posted years ago, reddit-style garbage replies, Q "revelations" that were solved years ago and now one of the questionable accounts is posting silly trash ideas that have no bearing on the post. Might as well have serialbrain2 posting here 😐. We're getting a little too close to the_donald territory, and once that threshold is crossed, it's fair game to say the board is lost.

How about the mods stop posting for a while and boosting their imaginary internet points, and spend a little time to clean up these accounts? If you need to ask the board creator for the tools to run some decent sql queries. Check creation dates and times (especially if you see 100 accounts created in the middle of the night going to a university or business domain as example), email aliasing, IP's with a bit of cross referencing. For example, if you see an account that has an email with a plus sign in it, there is more than one account using the same address -- [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] ALL GO TO THE SAME [email protected] address, they only appear unique, it isn't that hard to check.

Having users reply to the message for appeal is what allows the exploit to succeed. Changing the appeal process to an email or some other method would reduce this attack.

Edit: perhaps a button you click to open an appeal window.

Might as well also show where or how one can submit modmail too, both on a desktop and on a mobile device, because it's not that intuitive.

If a shill goes to the effort, you know you are over the target...

Got one earlier today:

“You are banned from The Great Awakening. from Great_Awakening_Mods sent 2 hours ago You are now permanently banned.”

Some people are pathetic.

The fact that they are doing this means that they consider us so dangerous to them it is worth their time to try and pull these tricks.

We just want to be left alone to talk about our kooky theories. Why do they care so much?

I appreciate that GAW ban hammers the Democrat propaganda scum. Whereas PDW has turned into a sewage pile of DNC propaganda accounts manipulating discourse.

Keep it up.

Does the shill really include in his name, “Shill_Account_Shilling_To_Trick_You”? It seems almost jocular and friendly.

If you can post and answer, then the ban is fake.

Thank you for this. It helps us discern better on here.

I just can't seem to understand what they get out of doing things like that? What is in it for them if it's a real person? And if it's a bot, what exactly is the point if it can't actually ban a real person from the group?