There are a few user accounts here on Poal that obviously have implemented some level of scripting or automation to facilitate certain actions. Some of these users have created scripts to vote brigade or to do targeted down voting. Automation scripts rarely behave like a real person and to the trained eye and access to raw logs these things are easy to spot. Our admins flag users with the suspicious behavior label in these ways.
But there are other users who are also implementing automation for more benign ends. It is clear to me that there are a few Up Vote Bots that will up-vote everything in /all/new. It is also obvious that there are a few auto-post bots that are auto generating content.
In the very early days of the site (think back to when the logo was still a piece of rebar), I was super motivated to help make Poal better place and I looked into the Poal API to do things like creating a invidio or bitchute youtube-auto-mirror bot. I was also tempted to build a Voat re-post bot that would mirror posts from the subs I moded/owned on Voat before I left there for good. In the end I opted for real organic content and I abandoned these thoughts... mostly because of the total lack of API documentation. I will admit that in a moment of frustration I created a proof of concept bot that ran though the UI, not the API. All the bot did was upvote a list of posts I gave it and I only ran it once or twice. My intention at the time was to help make Poal better.
I carry no guilt for what I did... telling a bot to up vote a list of posts using your own account is basically the same as just up voting them by hand. My intentions were pure and my actions were just... but where is the line? I look at things like and I see a sub which is 100% bot generated. Every few days logs on and posts a series of posts exactly 1 min apart from each other and makes a single one-sentence comment on each post. Every 60 seconds... sometime for over a dozen of posts. Is this appropriate? Is the general Poal community OK with this? I look at u/ANFrance's behavior and I don't have a real problem... nothing but adding content. But where is the line? When does this go too far?
There are a few user accounts here on Poal that obviously have implemented some level of scripting or automation to facilitate certain actions. Some of these users have created scripts to vote brigade or to do targeted down voting. Automation scripts rarely behave like a real person and to the trained eye and access to raw logs these things are easy to spot. Our admins flag users with the suspicious behavior label in these ways.
But there are other users who are also implementing automation for more benign ends. It is clear to me that there are a few Up Vote Bots that will up-vote everything in /all/new. It is also obvious that there are a few auto-post bots that are auto generating content.
In the very early days of the site (think back to when the logo was still a piece of rebar), I was super motivated to help make Poal better place and I looked into the Poal API to do things like creating a invidio or bitchute youtube-auto-mirror bot. I was also tempted to build a Voat re-post bot that would mirror posts from the subs I moded/owned on Voat before I left there for good. In the end I opted for real organic content and I abandoned these thoughts... mostly because of the total lack of API documentation. I will admit that in a moment of frustration I created a proof of concept bot that ran though the UI, not the API. All the bot did was upvote a list of posts I gave it and I only ran it once or twice. My intention at the time was to help make Poal better.
I carry no guilt for what I did... telling a bot to up vote a list of posts using your own account is basically the same as just up voting them by hand. My intentions were pure and my actions were just... but where is the line? I look at things like [/s/France](https://poal.co/s/France) and I see a sub which is 100% bot generated. Every few days [u/ANFrance](https://poal.co/u/ANFrance) logs on and posts a series of posts exactly 1 min apart from each other and makes a single one-sentence comment on each post. Every 60 seconds... sometime for over a dozen of posts. Is this appropriate? Is the general Poal community OK with this? I look at u/ANFrance's behavior and I don't have a real problem... nothing but adding content. But where is the line? When does this go too far?
(post is archived)