Community PSA | Bots

𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐓𝐒

Today I am here to address the sudden flood of bots that have invaded our community, as well as many other communities across all of Amino. Luckily, raids of this magnitude are typically infrequent, but still extremely disruptive to the entire community when they do happen. So I'd like to give you all a bit of information on what these bots look like, how we are addressing the situation, and what you can do to protect yourself from future raids.

𝙃𝙊𝙒 𝙏𝙊 𝙄𝘿𝙀𝙉𝙏𝙄𝙁𝙔 𝘽𝙊𝙏𝙎

There are many different types of bots that can attack communities from time to time. But most share common features in how the s are named. The raid that occurred today was a wave of repeated s with identical names, but we have also seen raids where s were named with either a seemingly random jumble of letters or a female name that’s followed by an assortment of 5 random numbers.

The Leaders here are used to dealing with bots and will work quickly to remove these s as soon as we notice them. However, we cannot always stop a wave of spam before it occurs. Locking the community is a last resort option, but will not stop spam from bots which already ed and must be removed one at a time.

𝙃𝙊𝙒 𝙏𝙊 𝙍𝙀𝙋𝙊𝙍𝙏

For individual bots that send you a single message, we ask that you simply flag the message as spam and then leave the conversation. In the case of a mass raid, as what happened today, you can PM a Leader to alert them of the situation. You may not get a reply right away - If we are showing as online but not responding, chances are we are already working as fast as we can to remove the s.

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Please keep in mind: While we understand that bots are extremely annoying, do NOT be tempted to spam back at bot messages or otherwise break guidelines by sending inappropriate material to spammers in retaliation. The bots will not be deterred by your messages, as they are not real people, and you can end up in trouble yourself by the content that you send. Just flag the message and leave the conversation.

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𝙋𝙍𝙊𝙏𝙀𝘾𝙏𝙄𝙉𝙂 𝙔𝙊𝙐𝙍 𝘼𝘾𝘾𝙊𝙐𝙉𝙏

Unfortunately, many of us are currently dealing with clearing out a mass of 400+ chat invitations due to the severity of today's raid.

The best way to prevent yourself from being hit by these bot raids is to limit your chats requests. This can be done by accessing your settings and switching the "Allow Inbound Chat Requests" to " I'm Following" (or Disable them entirely, if you prefer)

Updating this setting will prevent bots from being able to send you messages within this specific community. Note that there are also bots which target Global profiles rather than individual communities, so you can also update this same setting on your Global to prevent those attacks as well.

Thank you for reading and stay safe!

Cover art is official

Edit by Britt