Nice to see someone doing something about it. Tried getting a reply from Steemit Inc. about their SP being used for flag abuse but they either didn't see my messages on Steem and Twitter or they just didn't care at all. If your bot needs more SP, just tell me and I'll gladly delegate some, it's already mostly used on autovotes anyway due to my exams starting in less than a week.
By the way, here is a little suggestion to improve the bot. I think it should wait until something like 30 minutes before upvoting is not allowed anymore to upvote the flagged content. It's just to make sure that power isn't wasted on voting multiple times for the same content. Like let's say one of these flag bots flags a post, your bot will automatically upvote it. The problem is that if another bot later flags the same post, your bot will upvote it once again, resulting in voting power being lost. If it waits for something like 30 minutes before it can't vote, it could calculate the combined vote weight to be applied. Maybe it already does that, my bad if that's the case.
Anyway, thanks for making this, it is greatly appreciated !
Unfortunately, the posts get locked out for upvotes within the last 12 hours prior to cashout but is not the case with flags. I could try to tune it to wait and hit the posts immediately prior to lockout to at least minimize adjustments during the upvote window.
That will require more intensive accounting but I like a good challenge. For now, just going to let it run through the list of active posts I had with best effort votes.
I'll make some improvements for the next round. Think we have a good start. Camille is gonna be pissed. Lol
Thanks for the comment and thoughtful feedback!
i find it really sad that noone (who can do something about it) seems to care that this massive amount of vote manipulation, abuse and witchhunting takes place. if you cant flag an account it it hasnt posted naything but the account itself is able to flag without a limit the system is flawed.
Well to be fair, these accounts cannot flag limitlessly due to their massive amount of flags draining their voting power away (which is in part why their flags are so meaningless). I don't really see how we could have a system that allows to flag users that have no content. Maybe we could try to have some sort of flagging that effects the voting power of the flagged user but this would probably get abused easily. The big problem in the scenario we are witnessing right now comes from Steemit Inc. and nothing else. It kinda shocks me to see how easy it is to go through their account creation system with throwaway emails and phone numbers, especially when we know how long it takes to get verified. What's happening during that verification process if it's not spent verifying that the user is legit. What is even more frustrating is that this could be easily stopped by Steemit Inc. by simply undelegating the Steem Power delegated to these bot accounts, this would effectively make them useless since they couldn't interact with the blockchain. But since Steemit Inc. doesn't seem to care...