Theres so many accounts that haven’t liked, replied or created a thread, they haven’t even read for a minute!!! @AnkerOfficial you guys need a 1 month probation before using powerbucks or something, its crazy how theres tens of thousands of accounts and only a few hundred that are actually active
Ghost Accounts?
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But these accounts will get active where one of them is the receiver of votes and the others doing the voting. To stop a pattern forming you need many more accounts than you use so one competition one account is liked and say 100 other accounts do liking, and then it rotates around.
While you can use TOR to mask your true IP there are only so many TOR exit nodes so many accounts from the same IP is likely a prelude to an attack.
An attack?! What should we do?
we save the forum by hacking them first! or we have anker wipe out all the inactive accounts ahead of time. What they should be worried about is their server getting hacked or worse the website.
We?
Absolute nothing against a sustained effort. We can only give up and go away.
Anker can filter by not allowing new members to do much.
We can then filter by flagging fake posts.
A bot will have a 10-30 sentences so “Love Anker” “Great product” “Love to win” type and then based on the subject will use these randomly to fake being a real person. We can spot them.
Ultimately however we cannot flag manually a hoard of bots, it relies on Anker giving a damn and acting to protect real customers.
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As the forum grows, not only would we do this to help the kids, but it also should not be limited to bots. There are becoming too many people posting things in blatant attempt to earn bucks, and we need to all come together to be a part of the solution, not the problem, and not a bystander.
I’m afraid this issue will only become more serious if it is not addressed now. Honestly, if the posts are not meaningful or the topic already exists elsewhere, I’m going to try to do better and start flagging more… Not only because they’re earning bucks when they weren’t deserve, but more importantly, to prevent the forum from becoming a mess of excess spam.
We are currently the only two Senior Members.
I am reluctant in a member based flagging primary method because it can cause a personality based community where the few shout down the many and makes a less diverse forum from which we all suffer. I have flagged say 2 or 3 times the last year?
I would like to see Anker use technology to fight technology, the bots are 80/20 removed by automated systems, and then the members filter the rest.
So a team community effort.
Probably currently Anker is the weakest part here at the moment, it is obviously not filtering new accounts and not filtering posts, so it is opening this community up to total failure. If this forum became blasted by bots I’d have to withdraw, I suspect others would do the same.
I saw this problem in the Youtube “power up” contest, it was rancid for most of the competition.
Mentioned a similar thing before being allowed to enter competitions, that a certain level needs to be obtained before entry.
Agree with a lot of the points you chaps have made (and some have been mentioned on PM to @AnkerOfficial since the relaunch) but at present the only thing community members can do is be vigilant and use the flagging system when ‘blatantly’ obvious posts are made from suspected ghost/spam accounts to generate points. This will allow the admins to research and close the account / void entries and like if it meets their criteria. Should things progress more on ghost accounts / spam additional systems / filters can be developed and put in place by Anker.
Yes it is a bit of a ‘well the horse has already bolted’ scenario but unfortunately that’s where we are at present.
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Flagging can handle individual users slowly creating many accounts to increase chances but a deliberately scripted mass effort is beyond flagging.
Humans flag humans.
Software flag bots.
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Not disagreeing just adding my two pennies worth based on past conversations…
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Now I don’t know the specifics of this forum implementation, but it looks like some of these accounts may be “shell” accounts created when someone registers at Anker.com (not specifically the forum) using a Single Sign-On for another service (Google or Facebook).
For example, say you visit https://www.anker.com/login but you can’t remember if you created an account or not. You may try to sign-in with Google or Facebook, which likely creates a shell account in the background, but then the user finds this wasn’t the correct account and never uses it again. So we end up with a bunch of empty “phantom accounts” that probably should be cleaned up. I had something similar occur for a website I created for a client that insisted on offering a Facebook login.
Also, I’m not disagreeing that some of these accounts may have been created for unscrupulous purposes. But I believe a lot of them are just forgotten accounts created unintentionally.
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I think they create this account just for buying something on our Anker website, they never entry to the community.
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