How To Defeat Vote Bots

[thisisyourwakeup]

am being vote attacked by right wing Zionists. they instantly mark down ALL my videos as an aggressive atempt to deny me viewers.

[MW3modderman]

i want a copy but how do i know u didnt use votebot on thus vid and its not a scam?

[hardstyle905]

fake

[MWcrazyhorse]

what happens if a vote bot just drops2 or 3 star ratings? typically people rate videos either 5 stars, 1 star or not at all. wouldn't setting the programm to detect an average rating of below say 4,5 stars be best?

[askegg]

Good idea. I would be happy to give an OSX port a go, although my C is very rusty.

[kaxitaksi]

Awesome work! 5*

[luc59457]

Who logical even cares about ratings, subs, honors, etc?It's youtube. I certainly don't care lmao.

[luc59457]

Who cares about votebotting lol, it's youtube. Simply fucking garbage hahahaha. don't cry

[AcanLord]

Perhaps you care but

from the other side of the fence maybe?

[aZeroGodist]

Well seems such a simple solution to this on going problem that Youtube has refused to address, i would not release the source code as those using VB would like to see it, i still do not see this as a final solution which i will not explian, the only solution is within YT, giving us options of not accepting anonymous ratings, or having different grade users 1-5, and us picking which level can comment,rate,report etc on our vids.

[xXAkridXx]

Build self aware artificial intelligence

[joshTheGoods]

I will consider that, thanks. =P

[29Ocelot]

It looks like you are using VB, if so can we hear the version, and possibly view the source code?

[joshTheGoods]

The application is written in C#. I address the issue of open source in my blog post on the League of Reason.

Thanks for the comment!

[joshTheGoods]

Great idea, I'll include it in the next release. Oh, and thanks so much for testing on VirtualBox, you're the first! I'll tell all of the fruity computer users it's a thumbs up :P.

[joshTheGoods]

ANR means average new rating. Sometimes you get chunks of ratings between updates (especially when you're being attacked) so it's impossible to determine what each individual new rating was, so I get the next best thing - the average. This is the key statistic, as a low ANR over an interval of variable votes is what triggers the guardian to call on. ANR10 is the ANR for the 10 most recent data points.

[irishwolfhound1987]

Sounds like a great idea, but Id suggest making the coding open source or making the code for the current build available to download if it isn't already. For all we know you could have something to collect infomation built into your code althought I doubt it, this could build trust for more people to use it.

[joshTheGoods]

I was waiting for this to come up again ... Here's the deal, I've offered to have an independent 3rd party view and compile the source then provide to the tLoR where I couldn't modify it. I'm not releasing parts of the source because it could easily be abused.

The other thing you can do is download process explorer from SysInternals and look at the TCP connections the program makes in real time. If enough people ask, I will make a video demonstration of that process.

[docsquee]

Using this in XP, works fine as long as I use it along with a password. Entering just a username without a password doesn't work for me, anyone else have the same problem?

[joshTheGoods]

Doc, please remember that you must enter a password for all accounts. The accounts that you do not know the password for must have the password entered as a dash "-" no quotes. Please see my latest help video for a demonstration of this feature!

[ScrewLimbBizkit]

Does it work on Windows 2000. Cause I downloaded it, and I'm getting a message saying it's a dll file is missing

[joshTheGoods]

Please pm me and let me know what the exact error is. Thanks!

[EvilBproductions]

Where did my earlier comment go?

Very strange!

[TheraminTrees]

Sterling work — YouTube should be sponsoring you/offering you a job!

[joshTheGoods]

Thanks for the compliment Theramin... Maybe someone should start a letter writing campaign :).

[jsmxwll]

Beautiful, just beautiful. Not perfect but it saves the moral high ground lol. Well done. -Max

[Paxmax]

very nice work!

[eimajuno]

I just have one question. Is there a version for mac?

[joshTheGoods]

Not yet unfortunately. There is the possibility that when I have TubeGuardian done to satisfaction (I'm a permanently recovering perfectionist) I may find time to do a web based version that would always be on, and platform wouldn't matter to the end-user. Stay tuned, I'm a sucker for the crowd ... so the more people scream for it, the more likely it becomes :P.

[eimajuno]

A web based program would be great. I would really like to get my hands on something like this. I have been hit by the bots 4 times so far. What about multi channel support?

[joshTheGoods]

Mutli-channel support is already in, and functional! As a matter of fact, if you have a friend that is running the bot protecting their vids you could give them your password (I know, I know) and let them monitor your channel at the same time. It wouldn't change your experience whatsoever.

[eimajuno]

Well I might be getting a windows (xp) machine shortly. I see you are running this in what looks like either vista or 7. Will this work on XP?

[silverstream314]

Well, I'll scream for it as well then... ;)

You deserve a big round of applause for doing something about this flaw in the youtube system!

[pageboythehumanist]

This may have been asked already, but is there a way to allow it to detect "mark as spam" botting?

[joshTheGoods]

The issue has come up, but it is a good question nonetheless.

This sort of functionality is certainly possible, but the demand on resources would be rather large. When I retrieve video data, it all comes from one 'feed' (per account), but each video itself has a comment 'feed' I would have to retrieve to monitor comment data. Again, no issue programatically, but in terms of bandwidth it would be quite intense. Memory limitations would prevent historical data and analysis as well.

[pageboythehumanist]

Well, maybe a better option would be something that reverses it when it happens. For example, it goes through and hits "not spam" for every comment.

Then again, I'm not sure if the "not spam" option even works on youtube.

[joshTheGoods]

It seems that great minds think alike :). See my video entitled "How to defeat creationist mark as spam bots."

The button itself does *not* work, but I've developed a little solution based on the research of some other YTers. I will be adding this functionality to a future release of TubeGuardian.

Thanks for the suggestions, and keep them coming!

[nelliediddle]

This is great work & truly appreciated!

(Josh I keep getting a runtime error , what am I doing wrong LOL)

[Vogter2100]

This so great work man. :)

In my next vid's desciption box I will point others to your channel.

:-)

[tiecuando]

I mean lost stars.

[tiecuando]

Does it positive votebot? I mean, does it restore "lost" start?

[joshTheGoods]

No, sorry.

[tiecuando]

I guess then I'll have to do it. Thanks for nothing.

[joshTheGoods]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend? The reason my software wont do such things is because I personally think that sinking to their level would be a mistake. I'll reserve judgement on others that take that path, but I'll also steer clear of enabling such activities.

[jsmxwll]

I think you miss the point. This utility stops you from being hit hard by votebots while maintaining an honest code of conduct. It doesn't sink to the level of being a votebot, but it can protect you from being severely downrated by votebots. That's all. No point in being or doing that which you oppose is there? That would be the definition of hypocrisy.

[noblessus]

A very good idea to stop those damn votebots!

Question; Is this open source? I'd like to take a look at it.

[joshTheGoods]

see my latest video: ;)

[Zinthius22]

Dear josh, Up your audio if you can :)

[FratisNox]

This would be really awesome please finish this project

Quick Question : How long is the Voiting disabeled for?

[joshTheGoods]

Hold tight, in a few minutes a video of the new version will be processed! I'm hoping to get a public release out by next weekend.

Quick A: you tell it for how long :).

[SparkyLen]

Interesting program, well worth the effort.

While I don't think that I have to worry about votebots for the time being (my videos aren't commentary...) - you're the first person I'm going to contact if I do.

[joshTheGoods]

Thanks ;). Conveniently enough it will be hosted at the league of reason website where anyone will be able to get it for free when it's released publicly.

[diomedea13]

Excellent work! I hope this spreads throughout the community!

[lifeofryli]

very nice - key to all software is to get version one launched and then do updates beyond that.

good job.

[ToddAllenGates]

Looks great! (And I agree--ProfMTH is *top* rate!)

[joshTheGoods]

Thank Todd! Just having you post a comment on my page is a huge honor. I love your work, and your harmonica ;P.

[ToddAllenGates]

> Just having you post a comment on my page is a huge honor

I'm honored that you're honored!

[TheWindClaw]

One question: The computer has to be on in order for this program to work?

Excellent work by the way, any defense is better than no defense!

[joshTheGoods]

That is correct, though I am considering doing a web based service in the future.

Thanks for the encouragement :).

[AtheismandSkepticism]

Awesome program,

I know a bit of C#, so if want some help to add some features, I would be happy to help. Just hit me up with the source code!

5/5

[Sh0nin]

It's pleasing to know that creationists are about to lose their favorite toy.

[alexkillsdie]

youtube are messing with the videos again

[antiklaus]

I need protection from Youtube, not the spam botters.

Youtube has several times removed honors and withheld votes from my videos.

In one instance, I had over 100 comments made on my video and not a single "view" was recorded for over 12 hours. Nor were any votes recorded...

And this is not an isolated event.

I had the top-rated political video the day before Google bought Youtube. The day they did - in fact, within an hour, all my ratings were gone, and all my honors as well.

[gregsloft]

finally someone cares to stop the fagets who run votebots there all fucked up humans who have nothing better to do than rape other people

[niqueth]

Did you get raped by vote-bots? HAHAHAHA

[CrosshairJack]

Nice idea, programmers FTW

[RockingOnPluto]

"lol haahahaha u can't beat vote bots."

"woah it actually works"

LOL @ 12-year-old 5cr1pt k1ddy

[ScrewLimbBizkit]

We win! Now we shall dance! (if you don't start dancing you're a creationist)

[SuperFlyNB]

Also what about functionality for selecting multiple videos in the Guardian Status to disable/ enable ratings etc on multiple videos at one time?

[SuperFlyNB]

Question and possible suggestions. I see there is a log file. How is that saved, as a delimited file? Also if a new session is started is the old log file overwritten? Is a new created everyone time you start a new session? Is a new Log filed created every so often to prevent the log file from becoming too large? It would be nice to keep a history of the logs in a delimited format for later analysis in a spreadsheet.

[SuperFlyNB]

I need a proof reader

[Fr0zenLegend]

awesome dude! wow this is so much smarter then the guys who programmed the votebots! kudos!

[SuperFlyNB]

YES I deleted ALL my comments here because I don't want someone to stumble across them and go AH HAAAA.. IIll PM you the comments instead Josh

[joshTheGoods]

lol. great point. I'm so tired right now that I'm just sort of reading comments, and letting the reply fly off my finger tips.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Answersinbooks]

Can you write a version for mac OS? :P

[joshTheGoods]

Gah! I swear I just answered this one. I guess YT senses my fatigue and is enjoying a little romp on a rollercoaster with my emotions ;p.

Anyway, macOS can run the program using virtualPC I believe (it's a dotNET program). Another option is to find me a macOS programmer willing to port my source to object-C (I think that's what those weirdos use). Finally, if the demand is there I'll make an always on web version, but that wont happen for a while (this one isn't even completely done!).

[dyerasyd]

Mono has a port to the Mac OS. It would probably run fairly straight except for a few UI quirks...

[theninjasoulreaper]

How I would love to have a program like this

[ThetaOmega]

I have a suggestion, you think it would be possible one day to include a code that monitors how many comments are marked as spam, and maybe the ability to rapidly "mark as not spam" all comments marked as spam using the code of youtube? I have been told the button doesn't work on the page, it would be useful to have that functionality in case of mark-as-spam bots.

[Desertphile]

The problem with monitoring the "Spam" flag is that each comment has one: if a channel has 100 videos and each video has 100 comments, the program would have to monitor every comment page for every video and look at every spam flag for each comment.... and do it constantly. That sucks up bandwidth.

[joshTheGoods]

lol. I appreciate the offer, but no thanks.

[dprjoneslives]

Thanks for your contribution and work.

But I have a question - why can't youtube do this?

[CluebotUK]

A better question would be "why don't Youtube do this?" I suspect the answer is because they don't care.

[joshTheGoods]

That's a great question. I think there are two big reasons...

1. YouTube gets into dangerous waters when it tries to determine what activity is human and what is computer. As a megalomaniacal programmer, I think that I could handle it, but the reality is it would never be perfect. YouTube seems to support this claim by studiously staying away from taking a direct hand in community interactions.

2. It's just not that high on their priority list. It sucks for YTAtheists, but we're a minority.

[joshTheGoods]

Sadly this is the truth. The good news is that, although in a terribly limited way, YouTube has guidelines that address this. Videos aren't taken down until they are reviewed. Yes, they appear as "inappropriate" for a time, but who uses safe search? and who sees the "this video may be inappropriate" message and decides not to watch the video.... It gets me excited if anything. *shrug* If it becomes a real issue they'll make "unflagging" a community action.

[joshTheGoods]

I haven't considered the idea of people selling my freely available program that I'm going through the trouble of publicizing to the fairly limited amount of people which it would have appreciable value.for. Let me think about that for a second ... nope, won't be a problem. Hell, I'll send you a copy of your own to try and sell ... pm me your email address ;).

[DrMarcusHill]

Congratulations on keeping calm and civil with this unutterable dickwad.

[joshTheGoods]

Look, I know ethics aren't for everyone, but at some point you have to think that a legitimate approach might be just as, if not more, valuable than the illegitimate offer. If I were to try and monetize this program I certainly would NOT do it by "hacking" someone's account and using it to advertise. It would be more cost effective to pay for YouTube's promotion feature. Look, just calm down ok? You just vote botted me ... you're lucky I haven't blocked you.

[TyScribz]

awesome program great job

[joshTheGoods]

*sigh* You're a caricature of a black hat. I don't even know what to think of you at this point. The only thing that has me convinced that you're not someone I know messing with me or something is your profile page. *shrug* At least on some level you're entertaining.

[joshTheGoods]

At some point you'll start to realize that success and accomplishment are functions of how you feel about yourself, and how you feel about yourself is a function of the net effect of your actions. I'm giving it away for free because it's the right thing to do.

Work hard, and do the right thing. The rest will take care of itself.

[JonnyTHM429]

out of the goodness of his heart?

[JonnyTHM429]

interesting, I would vote this up but unfortunately xxxvirojanxx is vote botting this right now so I can't :P

[joshTheGoods]

Hey! thanks a ton! you just successfully tested my vote bot detection, and good news! it worked!!! You'll notice that you got about ... 5 votes in before my bot disabled ratings on ALL of my videos. Congratulations moron ;).

[joshTheGoods]

Your lack of knowledge shines through when you put forward your impotent suggestion on how YouTube could defeat vote bots. I actually touched on the fact that vote bots do not need to "view" a video in order to rate it.

Furthermore, the view count "freezing" around 300 is not something you can "hack" away from. It has to do with how often the view data is updated on the YouTube server. Again, I covered this (partially) in my video. You're a (poor) impostor. Stay in school kid.

[Textra1]

The work you have done on these programmes is awesome. It's such a boon for the YT community. Perhaps you might want to contact some of the high profile YTers like Thunderf00t or Aronra and see if you can't get some publicity for this. This is exactly the kind of thing that would put a serious halt on the votebotters seeing that Google don't seem to want to do anything about it.

[Neeboopsh]

youtube could easily determine which accounts (or ip addresses, which can be cross referenced to accounts even if using ajax directly) did the votebot attacks and start temp-banning peoples accounts who are being used for vote-botting. they have the backend data that we dont. but we should (lol, as if my channel gets enough views to really call it 'we')....anyway, we should keep the stats in an sql database somewhere and inform youtube so they can look at the stats/times/video data. maybe fix it

[joshTheGoods]

Another great suggestion! I'll add an option to send statistics on attacks to a central email that will forward them to the proper YouTube authorities. Maybe if we get a large enough user base YouTube might listen to our collective complaints when coupled with solid data. Thanks for your input :P.

[Neeboopsh]

If any of these big-guns users have a web host with some mysql. it'd be slick to have direct database updates to a central location so all of us nerds can look at the data. porn is getting old, but votebot stats...now thats getting sexy :P if nobody has a webhost (hard to believe, but it could happen) i could step up and get that rigged up

[Desertphile]

Great idea, that! I have Remote MySQL that could be used, using ODBC and ADO. The client computers would have to have the activex data object library installed on them.;

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

Featured the video and will be looking to publicize soon...

Idea, if you can get access to the source of the ratings, by country, then maybe that could be an indicator. The problems would be the use of proxies would bypass that entirely... Just a thought

:)

Also, I would love to get a copy of the program to test/use

[Martyj2009]

Another thing you could do to help speed it up is to load the pages text only. I wouldn't know how to do this exactly, but it would save

bandwidth because you aren't loading images, css, embeded items, and advertisements.

[Desertphile]

If I recall correctly .createDocumentFromUrl() will download the images, but InternetOpenUrl() does not. I could be wrong. The MSHTML.HTMLDocument DOM object includes all of the elements in a HTML page but I've never tried to look at the IMG tag.

[Martyj2009]

I wouldn't know :P I don't know c#. Just java, c++, php, mysql, html, css.

[joshTheGoods]

Thanks for the info, I'll test InternetOpenUrl and createDocumentFromUrl to see if they download images (by default) and get back to you on that one. FWIW I'm pretty sure the DOM objects representing IMG tags (HTMLInputImageClass, IHTMLInputImgElement, etc) only hold the source of the image file itself, ie the url.

[Desertphile]

At the moment I'm too weary from stripping old paint off a donkey cart, otherwise I would look at the document object's image tags myself. :-)

InternetOpen() allows use of a proxy server, which is how the rating 'bots and view 'bots work: they have a list of proxy servers they the 'bot cycles through. YouTube allows 202 views per video per IP address; a 'bot with a proxy server list of 100 servers can increase a video's views by 20,200 in under an hour. YouTube should put a timer in place.

[AlmightyAtheismo]

You seem quite knowledgable about this sort of thing.

Please check your inbox.

I'd like to discuss this with you.

[Desertphile]

Actually I know damn near nothing about the subject of vote 'bots and view 'bots. I just wrote here that which I have read on the 'net after I was subjected to 100,080 1-star ratings.

[joshTheGoods]

Thanks for the suggestion. I was pretty lazy in my use of the AxWebBrowser control. I'll put streamlining the enable/disable code on my todo list.