BeerBot Comment Update Aand Evidence The Comments Are Having An Effect
So I've been working on the commenting portion of @beerbot the last couple of days when I had some time. I added the ability to white list certain types of short links. Right now the only one added is google maps. More will be added as I find them. You can also suggest what kind of short links to white list. I know of a couple of others like google images and analytics so if you have an example of those you can reply with it and I'll get them added.
About an hour ago I added queuing to the comments so it shouldn't miss commenting when multiple posts happen in under 20 seconds anymore. The messages are queued to only post ever 23 seconds and to retry any missed ones due to RPC lookup failures up to a certain amount or times. Currently this is set at 10.
Now for the good part. While testing the queuing I was monitoring comments to make sure nothing went wrong and checking history on steemd. I normally look for things like downvotes on @beerbot comments. Most of the downvotes come from scammers and spammers so I like to check for those. I came across this nice little section in steemd:
Notice a bunch of downvotes all withing a few minutes of each other. Even more interesting is the presence of the account @perspectiveshift in the middle of them. This account was found posting phishing links earlier today. While the links were not detected directly as phishing links @beerbot did comment them and others caught and flagged the phishing comments. It turns out all those accounts were either created for or taken over by the phishing attacker.
Now the proof that this is having a effect on the attacker. @beerbot received this in a transfer memo just an hour ago right when I was monitoring the new message queuing code:
Yes the phisher is now trying to bribe @beerbot to stop commenting on his short links. So there you go. The comments are cutting into the phishers revenue stream enough that he has resorted to attempted bribery. Well that 30% better be in the 7 figures. @beerbot doesn't come cheap :D