Are we ever going to have a bot-free PhotoNet?

I posted a photograph a few hours ago and it recieved fairly good

marks and a few comments. And then it was struck by one of the "bot

raters". I assume that is what the rater is because the account was

opened only several hours ago and has already accumulated nearly 1100

rates, all following a very nice bell curve, and with a preponderance

of highly rated nudes. GOOD GRIEF! 1100 rates in less than a day??? If

this account were 8 hours old, that would require rating over 2

photographs every minute NON STOP for 8 hours! No sane human is going

to do that.<p>

The idea is to have an honest rating system, not one that is polluted

by this kind of activity. The anti-abuse programs here on PhotoNet are

not going to ameliorate this kind of rating problem. I do not want to

post any more of my photographs until this situation is rectified.

Did I renew my membership to face a gallery that is poised to deny me

an honest treatment of my work?

And let me add, I do not know what the actual rate was that this account placed on my photograph. I do not know if it was a 6 or a 3 (the range so far). But I do know that I do not want any fictitious dishonet rates on any of my photographs.

Walter, right after New Year, there has been several cases that fit your description. <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00AeHA">Here</a> and <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00AeJT">here</a> . Pretty sad, ain't it?

and on and on and on...

the ratings system definately needs to be changed - you shouldn't be able to rate unless you leave a comment to justify your rating, perhaps this would discourage the 'bot' rater? charlotte

 

www.charlotteaberg.com

I don't know how, based on the facts you have, that you can so confidently say that this account is a bot.

 

All you know are (1) that over the course of two days a person has rated 1100 photos; and (2) the person prefers nudes to other genres of photos. You have no information as to how fast this person is rating the photos, or whether there is anything else illegitimate about this account. Your assumption that no human is going to rate 2 photos per minute non-stop for 8 hours may be true, but that isn't what happened here. Humans do routinely rate 5-10 or more photos per minute for an hour, and it only takes two sessions like that to get to 1100 ratings.

 

As it happens, I've removed the ratings because, in fact, the person was rating photos at the rate of one every 2 seconds for fairly long stretches of time and that is too fast for me, even if it is humanly possible. Besides there are other suspicious things about this account. Based on the IP address (which is a school), I think this was a kid/troll, not a robot; but I still don't think photo.net needs these ratings.

 

But please don't start yelling "robot! robot!" in this forum every time you see someone rating a lot and a preference for nudes.

Brian how could anyone rate 1 every 2 seconds? Just tried it (didnt rate) and just to load image to image with dsl connect and position mouse over slots takes 7 secs...then a scroll would be required to actually look at the image.... any way to put a delay on the next load?

Doesn't matter whether it's a bot or a person.

 

A few days ago, "d s" (there are about a dozen of them in the directory, BTW) had your blessings, but now his rates appear to be gone, so it does appear that this issue is in flux. So what sort of patterns warrant an email to abuse@photo.net? Referring to the above, we see that one or more of the following will be looked at:

 

1) fast rating (one every two seconds)

 

2) long rating session

 

3) young raters ("kid/troll" and an IP address from a school)

 

The list of negative indicators you've mentioned since taking over this job is actually quite a bit longer, but while we see them as equally abusive, you see them as something you can't control and therefore define them as acceptable.

 

All this so the site can have a volume of rates that are "statistically significant".

Saturday school.

There are a lot of other factors, and no one factor is decisive. How many accounts have been created from this IP address recently (leaving aside some IP's for AOL, etc, from which a lot of people register)? What domains were used for the email address when registering? Hotmail, yahoo, etc are the most suspicious. What country is the IP address from? Some countries are, unfortunately, more suspicious. Is the IP address a school? Is there a consistent pattern to the email addresses and user names that suggests that one person dreamed them up? If all the accounts that were created from the same IP address have yahoo email addresses that look like JohnSmith123@yahoo.com, then that is more suspect than if it is a bunch of different email domains and various patterns to the email addresses. What else has been done with the account? If the account has uploaded photos, does it look like random photo that someone uploaded thinking that would disarm suspicion, or does it look like one that someone might really want to upload. Does the account have a bio, and what does it say. Is there a portrait photo? If it is a picture of a penis, or a one-fingered salute, that kind of decides it. If the person is rating through the rate recent queue (which is the only way for a human to rate photos very fast), are there any skips? Most real raters don't rate every photo; they skip some. Is the rating a robotic one-rating-per-n-seconds or does the person apparently stop and look at any of the photos at all? What is the pattern to the actual rating numbers? Are they all the same, or do they vary reasonably? 20 3/3 ratings in a row, followed by 20 4/4 ratings, followed by 20 5/5, etc, isn't as convincing as a random variation. Are the rating sessions in the middle of the night?

Do the ratings make sense, trying to put aside differences between my taste and that of the rater, or are they just crud? If the ratings are crud, it is a lot easier to delete them when the other factors are not quite decisive.

 

As I said, there are in fact a lot of factors We have a great deal of information in the database concerning rating, and it really isn't that hard to tell who is a real rater and who is either a robot, or a human troll robotically sitting in the Rate Recent queue creating crud.

Perhaps you can put your last comment in the tutorials section Brian. Under: HOW TO *SUCCESSFULLY* CREATE A BOGUS ACCOUNT.

 

heh

If the survive long enough without deletion, they can celebrate a 'bot-mitzvah.

hi hi so much fun on photo.net.... :)

If someone passed all the tests, plus others I didn't mention, it probably wouldn't be all that bogus an account. Also, it wouldn't be anywhere near "fun" enough for the typical troll to go through the process of creating a realistic looking account. For what purpose? What would they have proved? It isn't like the end result is that they get to steal millions of dollars and escape to the Cayman Islands.

Or we could refer to the phenomena as bot-ulism ;0)<p>

 

Brian: I know it has not been a very easy New Year for you. Thank you for the overtime that you are putting in. Regards.

No, but they do negate the fundamental area of Photo.net, the TRP, by rating their own photo's with bogus accounts.

Mark, yeah, but if they do that to any great extent, they then create evidence that it is a bogus account. Yes, if you really work at it you can create a completely realistic account and rate your own photos. You then get to steal the first prize, which is -- wait, what is the first prize again?

 

Actually, you just gain yourself a reputation on the Internet for being a cheater. Lots of fun. Worth really working at it.

People do things because they can. It's just a game, like chess. The goal is to see who is smarter. Those who write viruses, trojan etc. don't do it to make money. It's an intellectual exercise. I doubt that anyone who writes a ratingsbot is seriously interested in boosting the ratings of their images. They do it because they can and because it's probably more rewarding to them than downloading porn or watching TV.

 

There are easy ways to defeat a bot. The most basic is the scheme where you pesent the user with a GIF file of distorted text and require them to type in what they see. Of course these make an interface more clunky to use for legitimate users, but I can quite easily think up similar schemes which wouldn't be much of a burden to users and yet would disable most bots.

 

If a bot is well written and exectuted, there's very little you can do to detect it or stop it without some sort of requirement for human visual analysis as described above.

You aren't ever going to have even a half-decent rating system until rating is restricted to paid subscribers and quantity limited.

 

This is not in itself sufficient to eliminate all the hassles in this area, but it's a necessary prerequisite for making any meaningful progress.

My guess - and it is just a guess, I have no idea whether it's true - is that a subscribers only rating system would not be economically self sustaining.

 

The only viable business model might be two different and seperate galleries. One for subscribers only and one for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

 

I have no doubt as to which one would get the most traffic and which would provide most visibility for images.

Bob,

 

As you know a lot of people are interested in subscriber only rating.

 

Why do you think there is an economic implication and why do you think two galleries would be productive? Personally, I don't like the idea.

<i>Brian how could anyone rate 1 every 2 seconds?</i>

<p>

Nobody said anybody did. The estimate was 2 every minute.

<p>

The original poster needs to explain how a robot can recognize nude photographs.

I don't like the idea of two galleries either.

 

The economic implications are obvious. The more traffic the site gets, the more revenue is generated via advertising. If non-subscribers couldn't participate in the gallery, many wouldn't visit the site. Thus not only would they not generate revenue via advertising, but they wouldn't be able to "try out" the gallery so they would be less likely to decide to become subscribers.

 

Making the gallery "subscriber only" with regard to feedback on the images might well improve ratings and comments (though personally I doubt it would make a huge difference), but it would make a BIG difference to the number of ratings and comments. It might cut them by a factor of 5 or 10. It would probably drop the number of people viewing each image by at least a factor of 10.

 

Only Brian has the numbers. I'm just guessing. Since the numbers are proprietary information, I wouldn't expect Brian to post them in public.

 

I think ratingbots can be dealt with effectively by means of software. Human raters are more difficult to deal with...

There aren't enough subscribers to sustain the Gallery without the guest members.

 

For example, 6381 people were involved in rating photos during the last 30 days, of whom only 1336 were subscribers. Of the 5060 people who submitted photos in the Photo Critique Forum during the last 30 days, only 1228 were subscribers.

 

I'm grateful to the people who supported the site and became subscribers but even if it were a long-term goal to close the Gallery to guests (which it is not), doing it now would reduce the Gallery overnight to one-fifth its current size. It would be far less enjoyable and dynamic a place, even though the averagle level of behaviour might be slightly more decorous.

 

While there are some annoyances involved in having the Gallery be open, as it is now, everybody benefits from this openness, including subscribers, and calls from subscribers to make the Gallery more closed are not in their own interests or the long-term interest of the Gallery, as understandable as those calls may be.

Bob, you're exactly right about the motives behind setting up a bot. I only wish we could wrap ourselves around the idea that the same motives apply to other strange ratings behavior as well.

 

Ratings and gallery participation are not synonymous. I'm sure there are several members who can explain in detail how some of the other sites work, but I'm pretty sure this one is the least restrictive.

 

If you come to this site only to rate images, I, for one, have no use for you. All ratings-only accounts should be deleted. I assume you're here (in the gallery) at first to be inspired by everyone else's uploads and to read comments. The second level is to offer your own comments. The third is to upload your own images in hopes of getting not rates, but feedback. People who want rates have made it very clear it's only because they have been unable to attract enough attention to get the preferred comments.

 

Rating should be a priviledge earned by making a contribution to the site, be it financial, comments, uploads. . . . whatever.