Chihayafuru 3 botting is out of control

Kineta said:
We've been getting an increase in reports and PMs recently since the large score change in Chihayafuru 3, so I wanted to leave a message here to remind everyone we haven't forgotten or set it aside. In my weekly meetings with Media Do, this has continued to be a mentioned topic.

I've prepared a number of potential solutions from Luna's and my side that we'd like to see applied together to make a more complex scoring calculation that isn't super easy to discover and circumvent. The bottle neck is essentially waiting on the developers/tech team to come back with a review of our suggestions (and possible ideas of their own) so that we can agree on a plan and implementation can start. Unfortunately, with the 15th anniversary giveaway and MAL Live, there was only so much that could be done the last 2 months since devs cannot be conjured out of thin air. Additionally, the team is hesitant to apply changes hastily without careful consideration, so it's not just coding time but also consideration and review time.

On one hand, cases like Chihayafuru make Luna and I very angry, and incentivize us to delete these accounts. However, rationally speaking, these trolls are actually helping us, because it gives me a very strong playing card to demand urgency on backend changes (as compared to slow leeching or boosting of scores). So while the situation makes me angry and that emotion makes me want to sink 2-3 hours into deleting accounts... Logically, the only thing this would do is apply a temporary bandaid to a much larger problem—a bandaid that some snot-faced kid can rip off in the 8 hours I'm at my day job. So as much as the impassioned part of us wants to go on a rating troll account siege, Luna and I recognize that time truly would be wasted time.

Hopefully, this message provides a bit of reassurance, even though I realize it essentially boils down to: please wait a bit more..

StormSky92 said:


Sounds like Media Do doesn't want to do anything about it. This whole is because of the creator of the manga liking a pro-Hong Kong democracy tweet. No company has the balls to go up against China anymore, so i'm sure Media Do is in no hurry to come with a solution to stop Chinese bots from rate bombing the show.

Kineta said:
@StormSky92 That's some conspiracy level post there :'D I hope it was sarcasm/joking.

We just had the 15th anniversary giveaway and MAL Live, which took a lot of dev resources. That was a week ago. Give it a bit more time, please.

hazarddex said:
i don't even watch Chihayafuru, but i do find it concerning that there are at lest 65 bot accounts with the same name and just different numbers behind them and they haven't been deleted or reviewed yet.

Orhunaa said:


Chihayafuru 3? Downvoted
Nation? Saved
Hotel? Trivago

deg said:
how long until a bot war commence here? like Chihayafuru fans starts making bots of their own to mass downvote Vinland Saga as retaliation? lol

Kineta said:
Yesterday, the development team and Luna+I reached an agreement on an a first phase approach to combating the rating troll problem, with subsequent dev phases following the first to make the system more robust against malicious attacks.

Development will begin next week and a site-wide announcement will be posted once the first phase of the system is deployed. Please give us a bit more time for the tech team to implement our numerous demands and for us to test the output to investigate any unanticipated problems. This issue is high priority and we would like it resolved as quickly as the community does.

LegendaryRQA said:
I wonder how the scores of various shows will change when this is implemented.