Favorites Boosting Accounts: Ranking Recalculations

Geld from Slime isekai at a point of time had 10k favourites lmao. He now sits at 200ish

shush hypocrite, 27, 30 and 35% ain't anything to scoff at.

hypocrite ? Me ? How? I like one piece but i'm glad it got rid of the fake favs.

Whilst I'd hate to see the MAL site become restricted to paid-members I completely agree restricting reviewing and 'liking' reviews is the only effective means to combat the abuse. Of course the extra funds raised MAL can then plough back into more backend features to support as well.

Just an advice from me. Actually, the root of all these problems is bot accounts. As we know, the way those trolls working are by making a lot of account, rated some animes, add some favorite characters, then left the account for forever, and then their system made another troll account. That means, these bot accounts are having one main pattern: it never had been online again since its making. So, I would advise MAL Dev Teams to make a system that never consinder any data from an account that never been online more than once. You can adjust it into twice, just for prevention if the trolls are trying to reactivate their bot accounts once more.

It doesn't even need to be a paid feature, just a verification through credit card details, but that's probably a violation of data protection. They just need to make the process long/difficult enough that it would deter people from making bot accounts, i.e captchas and phone/email verifications.

Thanks a lot for doing this MAL! It will definitely make the scores a lot more trustworthy.

A lot of fans won't have credit cards for various reasons (ie. under age) and email verification is easy enough to be automated. Captcha would definitely be a step in the right direction though I think the best method would be to restrict reviewing and upvoting be paywalled.

There's already a paid "supporters" membership for fans who want to support MAL which gets you some fairly basic benefits; so the framework is already there to implement. If $30 a year is too much an ask then they could introduce tier membership where for a small $5 a year gives members the right to upvote with the 'premium' membership giving members more benefits - like maybe creating reviews at this tier.

Do people really care about this shit it’s a ranking on a anime site why do people care so much I don’t get it.

It's about the value of objective truth. People skew their favorite characters' rankings to appear more favorable so that more people will jump on the bandwagon so they'll get even more popular. Bot creators' primary goal is to either troll for giggles or chase an illusion of validity by making the things they like seem better than others'. It really is selfish, and allowing them to perpetuate only encourages the behavior.

did not think ichigo would get so much faves.

I am absolutely in tears that the zero two and Rem haters were bots all along. was too obvious

and just like that, top charts got thanos snapped

Looks like the character favorites got reduced once again,though only by small amount.

Thanks MAL devs for constantly trying to improve this platform!

Nice, meanwhile I will keep boosting reviews.

And how did you find duplicate accounts? What's the criteria in order to consider an account a "duplicate" or a "bot"?

Why would I publicly say that so that boosters could try to hide their tracks better?

I see. But one could even say that by not revealing the criteria, we can't even judge or criticize it. Maybe even I am considered a bot?
Although I am sure the mods/admins are not biased but every criteria can make a minor mistake when distinguishing real users from bots. Thanks for your reply though.

I appreciate your skepticism. Please let me assure you that when you see all of the information in a table, it becomes extremely clear what is bot and what is not. If anything, we err on the side of not-bot vs is-bot.

Is Attack on Titan getting boosted, seems S3 Pt 2 has a fair amount of activity of 10/10 accounts created today

Nami below Usopp and Chopper. I want to cry :(

For a long time, the number of collections of some characters has not increased, but decreased. However, the ranking of some characters is still crazy.😅

@Kineta
Can you check Itsuki from Go Toubun, in these 5 days the number of Favs has increased strangely, initially she has 7,987 Favs but in 5 days she has reached 8,779 favs, she gets at least 100 favs per day eventhough the anime is over while other girl has increased favs it still makes sense about 7-10 favs per day.

Other painfully obvious manipulations via bots:
https://myanimelist.net/character/146158/Zenitsu_Agatsuma
https://myanimelist.net/character/164578/Ai_Mizuno

@Kineta
Can you check Itsuki from Go Toubun, in these 5 days the number of Favs has increased strangely, she gets at least 100 favs per day eventhough the anime is over while other girl has increased favs it still makes sense about 7-10 favs per day.

https://myanimelist.net/character/161471/Itsuki_Nakano

Thanks, I'll run through the numbers once I have some time. This week is a bit psychotically busy orz.

I'm a little suspicious that Itsuki is being botted again because her favs have increased rapidly these past few weeks and are almost close to Nino and Miku, I remember her favs are still around 7.5k favs but now she has reached 9.3k favs.

https://myanimelist.net/character/161471/Itsuki_Nakano

https://myanimelist.net/character/185970/Kurena_Kukumila

https://myanimelist.net/character/150824/Vladilena_Miliz%C3%A9
Drawing your attention to these two character profiles.Specially Kurena has been botted to the point she’s about to surpass main characters in favourites.She shouldn’t have more than 150-200.I am sure Lena has been heavily botted as well recently.

@Kineta
https://myanimelist.net/character/150824/Vladilena_Miliz%C3%A9
https://myanimelist.net/character/185970/Kurena_Kukumila
Drawing your attention to these two character profiles.Specially Kurena has been botted to the point she’s about to surpass main characters in favourites.She shouldn’t have more than 150-200.I am sure Lena has been heavily botted as well recently.

@Kineta
3 months since the last time the favorites were cleaned :(

I mean Kaguya-Sama has become massively popular so a lot of people are watching it. Nowadays if I ask people for a romance anime it's usually Kaguya sama.

@Kineta

can you check the favorite count of these characters?? I'm a bit suspicious because they can get quite a lot of favorites in a short time, even when they don't do something prominent in the anime that makes them popular, they were characters that have been botted before being removed by mods.

https://myanimelist.net/character/161471/Itsuki_Nakano
https://myanimelist.net/character/185970/Kurena_Kukumila

I’m seeing a lot of characters that were previously boted rising up again at pretty high rates. Mainly Mami from Rent a Girlfriend, Itsuki from Quints, Kurena from 86, Iino from Love is War, and Ichigo from Darling in the Franxx. There are others but those are some off the top of my head who are getting massive jumps seemingly out of the blue. I hope they go back through and clean out the boys again :/

Source?

Just give up, MAL doesn't care any longer. All hail bots and fake votes, the only things that matter.

it will never be solved, they can't admit they are wrong, they say they already have a program for that, but you don't see the ratings being fair, the series score 1 only increases, they don't ban and the ratings only go up when the fandom of a series decides to boost it

I think the favorites list is long due for another cleanup. It's been months since the last one and I really feel like the usual suspects are starting to have some really strange growth. One Piece for example has been gaining an insane number of favorites as of late, much more than the other anime in the Top 6. While I assume it's possible that this is legit (maybe the current arc is great and attracting new favorites), it definitely raises some eyebrows given than One Piece and its characters were some of the most fake boosted entries last time.

@Kineta, I assume that there is a good reason why your system for detecting and deleting boosting accounts isn't automatic, but why can't it at least be weekly or even just monthly? As things currently stand, the rankings have been inaccurate for months (basically since the last cleanup).

I've been wanting to go through it myself too for a while now, but I have my hands completely full. Considering the other high-priority projects I'm currently juggling, I think we might be able to do another clean-up of the favorites sometime in April or possibly May. Please be patient for a while longer.

Thanks for letting us know that it’s been noticed! We appreciate all your hard work.

Wow even new show Shikimori has botted literally who to top in favourites just because bot-tard was triggered by it.

this confirms what i suspected for a long time now too that the anti bot system is not an automated process so knowing that people will simply do more spam bots since the system is not even periodically doing cleaning of scoring bots anyway

MAL is adding a lot of features lately but they seem to just at least 50% effective and/or finished and not even at least 80%-90% effective or finished features

its not even be called beta features but just alpha version features

last time u guys were too harsh on gintoki....he fell 71k to 59k...its been almost a year he is on 67k...his popularity is legit bro...dont be harsh with gintama their popularity decreasing and so many people downgraded gintama so plzz cleaning accurately!!!

Well done, now that girl from Shikimori which had 1k more favs then titular character, now has only 200.
Also Itsuki fell to third place, from ~20k to 11k

OMG these many bot favourite were luffy

Itsukitard bot guy is back at game. He boosted Itsuki Nakano to be just 1k less than most popular Miku (after last purge it was 19k vs 9k) and Mami from Kusokari to be almost as much as Chizuru.

Edit: Other anime that loon is messing numbers up: Shikimori, Summertime Render, Ayumu, Kakkou no iinazuke.

Edit2: Ok, mods fixed some of them

Edit3: He's doing it again, Itsuki has 5k more than after last purge.

@Kineta This loon did it again, he boosted Itsuki to be over 21k
https://myanimelist.net/character/161471/Itsuki_Nakano
She was 11k after last purge as mentioned earlier.

Sigh. Thanks for letting me know.

@Kineta, A great initiative. I hope MAL can further expand on this. So, malicious user wouldn't try to manipulate scores.