When bots "like" your posts...

[Valka D'Ur]

... it's really creepy.

I had an email notification of an unfamiliar name "liking" an old post I didn't even remember making from some time ago. I see now that it was a bot/spam account that did this.

The account is gone, but I still have that phantom "like" made by someone/something that isn't real.

Is there any way to remove such "likes"? I'd prefer my "likes" to come from real people.

 

[leif erikson]

Do not see a way to remove likes from individual posts. xenForo forum indicates that an add-on is required to do this.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, that's annoying. I have no idea why a bot would go around "liking" random posts, unless it's to establish some kind of forum identity before doing what they really intended. It's odd that there would be no way to delete all the "likes" made by bot/spam accounts. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has received "likes" from fake accounts.

Thanks for your quick answer.

 

[leif erikson]

We can remove all likes from a poster, but I do not know who that poster is?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Obviously I want to keep the 'likes' I got from legitimate members. But this one isn't from a legitimate member. I didn't recognize the name in my alerts, got suspicious, checked the profile and got an error message... which tells me it's one of the bots one of you must have permabanned yesterday.

This is the post that was 'liked'.

I'd forgotten about that post, and can't imagine why a bot would like it. I guess some bots/spammers post or drop 'likes' here and there to look legitimate while either gathering information or doing worse things like damaging the site.

Would it be possible to remove all the 'likes' this "jenniferdonna" fake account did, without affecting the legitimate ones?

 

[leif erikson]

Done.

 

[The_J]

I'd forgotten about that post, and can't imagine why a bot would like it. I guess some bots/spammers post or drop 'likes' here and there to look legitimate while either gathering information or doing worse things like damaging the site.

It's all about connections, so more the former than the latter.
They put a spam link in their profile. For this link to be found, they themself must be linked somewhere, else the google bot and whoever else might not ever find the way to their profile. Liking something is an easier way (less likely to be detected) to do this than posting.

If there is an option to disable the like function for users below X posts, then it might be good to do that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Done.

Thank you, leif.