Published on 12, July, 2020
Greetings to All. This is the latest "Maintenance" Thread, or 'Report Spam' Thread. ( ...& For those not interested or not affected, I say just move on, or start Your own Thread. ) But this kind of Thread *is* necessary at times. NAS themselves say to start a New Thread when a New problem arises, and so that is what I am doing here.
NAS, There is a LIKEBOT here now, as well as a COPYBOT. Again. (Using a Plural does not matter.) This Thread is begun to draw Your attentions to the fact.
The BEST information on This Forum, about dealing with "Copybots":https://community.autism.org.uk/f/miscellaneous-and-chat/12621/copybot-and-forum-security/
The "LikeBot" is a new thing. I Myself have been seen to "like" certain (new) Users of whom I have no knowledge. This is the Thread to write about that, now. I have never "upvoted" these Persons but someone has FAKED My doing so...
So, NAS, --- SORT IT OUT!!!
Apologies that I have been away. DC asked me to take a look at this thread, so here are some initial comments.
I'm not sure whether the upvoting is malicious action, or simply unintentional. Some people do act maliciously on social sites for their own personal reasons, but often hacking has obvious motivations. One of those (as with spam posts including "copybots") is to try to use forums and similar sites to post links to one's own site. For likes, it's increasing the prominence of accounts.
However, in this case there don't seem to be great numbers of unexpected likes, even if someone did feel that it was worthwhile "boosting" an account on this site. It's hard to see why doing it once or twice would be worth the effort of hacking.
The Like buttons are quite close to others, such as Reply. Is there any possibility that you might have clicked on one unintentionally?