Favorites Boosting Accounts: Ranking Recalculations

Seems like Makima bots are back as well

Still not going to stop the problem. MAL needs to put a paywall between people and the ability to influence aggregate score, favorite rankings, as well as limiting review rating to only paying members. I would be quite happy to become a contributor in that case, and I would be much more assured that these things are legitimate.

This is a good step in the right direction!

thank you i appreciate your efforts to make ranking more reliable and faithful to original audience.

is ichigo from darling in the franxx a new waifu xD

I don't really get the effectiveness of this whole anti-botting recalculation if some of the characters who fell hard due to their bots getting removed are again gonna be botted rapidly to their positions before. Like Emilia fell so hard after the recalculation, well below the Top 50....and now she has once again rapidly made her way into the Top 50 in no time. This anti-botting recalculation only do remain effective if the characters who are still persistently being botted after the recalculation are taken care of again soon.

Is it not finished yet? The vas's faves suddenly change so much today

This is a nice feature, more power to the developers of MAL

Seems like this is a recurring system, which is pretty good. The bots of anime and manga fav have been removed once again. Now only the bots of char fav remain.

I already know some bots are boosting some Characters Favorites but I really didn't know Anime Favorites are related to bots. Yeah, evil should be erased. Keep it up, MAL team.

@345EdwardElric Yup. #48 in no time flat. Very sad.

The initial idea of removing boots is great, but how exactly does it work ? I noticed plenty of characters who randomly lost around 100-200 favorites very recently, days after the cleaning was made. And even more, those characters are quite niche ones and most of them didn't reach the 1,000 mark even with the help of the supposed "bots", how does that make sense ? Why would people boost relatively obscure characters without even making them reach 1,000 favorites ? And there are also characters who still have a completely illogical number of favorites, like this girl from Wonder Egg Priority who is apparently as popular as the main ones despite being a side character no one remembers.
That's why I'm wondering how it works because some loss in favorites don't make much sense to me.

They need to reset the favourites again and make it captcha based or some other system to prevent bots entirely. Sad that Emilia is being botted this hard considering she's one of my fav characters, Chika too, I want to see how their popularity genuinely grows. Kinda funny people care this much about where they place on a random ass list tho enough to waste time and bot, Emilia's popularity has grown massively this season anyway so I don't see why she's being botted into the top 50, cos she was top 60 legitimately which was more than she was last year.

I don't understand the reason behind boosting or inflating a rating system in the first place outside of bots or trolling, (which ultimately is a lost cause). No one takes ratings seriously anyway. Maybe that's their point? But we already know it without their intervention lol...

I noticed that my one of my favorites was getting 2 or 3 every other day and was close to getting 600 favs now he is back down to 488. Well it was nice while it lasted too bad those were bots to boost and not legitimate users

There are still boost characters, no? Chika Fujiwara climbs the rankings (from p101 to p71 in a short time)

This is some proletariat word if I saw one

@_Alysha_: well you mustn't assume otherwise

@tokihikki: suck it Chizuru.

ikr, someone said Lelouch is only on top because of bots, now he can shut up

what if you have to complete CAPTCHA before scoring or favoriting a characters, but after you score something (not favorite something) which means you passed the CAPTCHA, after 30 days (optional but at least 12 days) you will be able to unlock the mode to favorite or score something without any CAPTCHA. sounds annoying to new users but they also have to understand.
of course this is to new users to stop bots

Good, I care about those ratings just enough to be happy that Luffy isn't getting that 1st place. A matter of principle for me. He should be in top-10 most horrible characters in existence, as far as I'm concerned. Was worried about him sitting at the top by the time I register here. Otherwise, I don't care about favourites rating all that much.

Thats Quite nice seeing so much efforts & visual data.

Thank you for keeping the platform healthy and safe!

I still suspect Lelouch to be heavily boosted. Unfortunately, some people are clever enough that they can make a bot account look like an old abandoned one with enough manipulation.

they never learn, just let them do it again until MAL does the Bots clean up again, I want to see how frustrated they are.

Just want to note that we're monitoring and aware that some botted characters are rising again. Please be assured that those favourites will be corrected as many times as they need to be.

Some characters I like to a tumble - oh well, quality of quantity as they say...

i dont know how the counting system works. Elaina got 10.6k, then 3.3k after re-calculation. But now she get 5.3k again.
I love her and how people choose her too as fav. character.
Hope the system of myanimelist get better ...

Looks like there was some big Ichigo fans around :D

Why does it look like they removed all the votes but they missed Levi and lelouch

damn, quite a troublesome problem.

I have a mild feeling that a cult of Sakura Bots are on the uprising again, even though Fate Stay Night media hasn't been trending lately.
https://myanimelist.net/character/500/Sakura_Matou

Yikes imagine duping that much for a series as overrated as kny already is

Captcha should be anime themed , eg choose characters with flat chests in the picture

genius idea, that would make it less annoying, in fact it won't even be annoying to some people, but some people don't like ecchi stuffs so it should be optionable to choose normal CAPTCHA or anime-type CAPTCHA.
ah but all this ideas are useless and fantasy, i don't think this idea will be accepted anyways

You guys are doing a really excellent job. As a developer myself, I understand just how difficult it can be to correctly identify patterns and action them accordingly. It's a credit to your developers that you've been collecting enough data over a long enough period to track this kind of thing down at all.

Keep up the good work.


That's probably the exact attitude that the people responsible for botting him had. The MAL team wouldn't be taking action unless they were sure about their algorithm for detecting fakes. For them to take such decisive action indicates to me that they're confident about the fake account identification.


People designing bots aren't stupid. It's not like the bot accounts are just created, do the job and then forgotten about. A developer could just have a program that sits there for a month taking random actions with thousands of accounts in order to make them look legitimate.

I'm sure the MAL team are smart enough to keep their methods for identifying bot accounts a secret. There are more advanced techniques for identifying fake accounts that they could use. They likely use a many layered approach that provides a confidence level for each account. Certain behaviours would reduce the confidence level while others increase it. I can't be 100% sure that this is the approach that MAL are taking, but this is what I would do.

or pick the girls and it just shows a bunch of traps

Sheesh! People are THAT obsessive that they will waste their programming talents to make their favorite fictional characters more recognized??? I shouldn't be surprised by this point. -_-

Nah it's not like that. Programmers grow their skill by challenging themselves. More likely than not, a few people just thought, "wouldn't it be cool if I could make a program to do this?" And went ahead and did it.

In a similar vein, I wanted to make a MAL app for Samsung TVs. I got about half way through with it before I shelved it due to lack of time.

I still learned a lot about authenticating a user with an API using OAuth2.

The people making bots to affect MAL stats probably learned plenty and were able to transfer some of the skills into a more professional setting.

Programming is all a matter of experience.

I do hope it's not just "Favorites" and bot accounts spamming "10 score" on anime and characters that will be removed next week, but also the bots and people spamming "1"-scores on shows.

Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san is the 2nd most popular show this season if you look at the number of members and started out with a 7.5+ rating but as soon as Twitter cancel-culture started nonsense about false racial characterization of the main character and the teasing/bullying(?) which is basically the entire concept of the show, tanking the score below a 7 before it got boosted a little again.

The problem with this is that you have one side downvoting it into oblivion and others that might feel the low score is unwarranted that are more likely to give it a a way higher score than they would normally give to offset those giving low scores.

Boku no Hero Academia 5th Season has 180.257 more members but only 16.689 votes more for a total of 15%~ voter turnout, the #3 show Fumetsu no Anata e has a voter turnout of 16.8% whereas Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san has a voter turnout of 18.5%.

Boku no Hero Academia 5th Season:
Total voters: 79446 voters
Total Votes between 1-4: 2935
Votes between 1-4 %: 3.7%
Votes with "1" score: 1.1%

Fumetsu no Anata e
Total voters: 56569 voters
Total Votes between 1-4: 468
Votes between 1-4 %: 0.8%
Votes with "1" score: 0.3%

Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san
Total voters: 62757 voters
Total Votes between 1-4: 5204
Votes between 1-4 %: 8.2%
Votes with "1" score: 2.5%


Something seems off about the numbers, the percentage between 1-4 and the "1"-voters is way higher than the other two shows.

Keep up the good work, guys. And thank you for highlighting Senjougahara's queen status.

@Kineta the system might not be a proper solution to the problem, because the character favorites are counted live. Unlike the score system which updates after a while.
Why not just hide the number of favorites from the characters and just show the ranking(just like with anime and manga entries) , that way the calculations can be done using some time and bot votes will not be counted.
Edit : by hide I mean you have to click on the character details to see the numbers.

you tell me that people have enough time to make more accounts on here to push anime and character higher in the ranking ?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Woah this is something new for me ~never thought Lelouch got that much of spotlight considering that anime is bland for me. still Happy to see Guts still in top#100 list though.

east or west, Kineta is the best.

Monica, Dorothea, Marika, and Liliana for the . . . loss.

Oh, and death to Kallen and Suzaku.

LeDOUCHE

Late to the party, but I'm glad mal is doing something to combat the massive bot problem. I do feel bad for Ichigo though lol.

just let it go to hell like all your other ranking systems it is opinion anyway

I was traumatized when I noticed Ichigo in the Top 50 few days before this.
Thankfully it is fixed now 😁

Glad to see that MAL right away once again took care of the persistent bots boosting certain characters even after the "anti-botting recalculation" was done the first time. RIP Emilia & Chika who were rapidly being reinstated to their "previous" high positions through bots lol.

Good job in taking of the issue yet again, right away when it was needed, MAL. 😊

because its simply bullshit... old characters from old shows has virtually no movement for a year or more and some even has less than they have a year ago

what i want to know is how sure the admins are if the deleted numbers are all bots, how sure