TubeBuddy Suggestion A Spam Destroyer Feature - Automatically Delete Spam Comments and other features

[tennman]

There could be multiple ways TubeBuddy could help with SPAM comments. Any or all of these features would be awesome since my channel has a HUGE problem with spam!

1. The ability to delete ALL the comments of a single user on our channel WITH ONE CLICK (as of now, YouTube only lets you delete ONE comment at a time and these bots can post hundreds per day so trying to combat the spam is unrealistically time consuming).

2. Limit the number of comments that can be posted in one hour/day (again, the bots that plague my channel post hundreds at a time and if TubeBuddy had a feature where we could decide the max allowed, that would be helpful).

3. Limit number of comments from new accounts - These spam bots use their software to create new accounts when the others are deleted by YouTubers. This way, a new account (created in the last 48 hours or something like that) could only post 5 comments per day for example for the first week or whatever time frame we saw best.

4. Hide accounts who use certain words on their first post - For example, a ton of the spam comments on my channel say, "I know a powerful man who...." and they are trying to scam people into a "love spell." If there was some type of scan that would delete that comment but also hide the user before other comments could be made, that would be very helpful.

5. Spam reports hide user - As best I can tell, YouTube is overwhelmed with spam reports on comments so they aren't able to do much about it. It TubeBuddy had a way of knowing if an account had its comments reported as spam, an option in TubeBuddy's "Spam Destroyer" could be that when users report spam that the account be hidden from making comments until/unless the account owner marked the comment as legit (unlikely since we all know what spam is).

My channel gets HUNDREDS of spam comments a day where the bots are hard selling scams to my commenters. It's a black eye for my channel that my users complain about and I'm already putting hours a day into trying to simply delete a portion of them and to block who I can. But having to delete each spam comment one by one is an impossible task. HELP TubeBuddy!

 

[tennman]

One additional feature:

6. Delete Impersonators - Those spam bots create accounts with my channel's username and even use my picture to try to deceive people! If TubeBuddy could automatically delete comments by impersonators of the channel creator and also hide them from commenting after they are detected, that would be WONDERFUL!

 

[Bears and Butters]

These are all really great ideas, however many of these would definitely not be possible through TubeBuddy...

Working in the Network Engineering Environment, and understanding databases, TubeBuddy would have to have some SERIOUS access to the YouTube APIs and permissions within. These are requests you would want to ask directly from YouTube as this has to do with direct access to SQL databases. ALL major companies have least privlege processes where they will allow companies the minimum access to perform their functions. The same is for accessing companies database assets. All it would take is 1 TubeBuddy account to get hacked, and the havoc that could be created on one persons YouTube account in a couple of clicks could be catastrophic! Not to mention a HUGE liability to YouTube and TubeBuddy.

Limiting access and timings on databases are to the discretion of the company holding the rights to the data servers and equipment... in this case YouTube.

If you are getting hundreds of spam comments a day, have you considered blocking certain words that are COMMON in each of these bots comments. That's the easiest way to handle this type of silliness.

As for deleting impersonators... YouTube I can almost guarantee has "fingerprinting" available, which means unless you know how to hide your computers information properly, YouTube can determine which computer has multiple accounts, regardless of whether they used a VPN or other security method. Your best option is to report these spammers, and if you report enough of them, then quite possibly YouTube will do an internal investigation on this, and if they see the "Fingerprint" of enough spammers, they can take action, block or warn users, or take legal actions if they see fit.

Now this is all my professional OPINION and not the inside business practices of TubeBuddy or YouTube... but I'm just expressing typical business practices in the Networking world when it comes to Enterprise grade businesses.

These would definitely be awesome though!!

 

[tennman]

Right, I have certainly blocked all kinds of words that spammers use but they adjust AND YouTube's system isn't that great for it as it seems to not notice a lot of times those words are used.

Second, I and my team report spam comments daily as do commenters to my channel who also complain about the spam. It seems to do absolutely nothing even though I had hoped that YouTube would use the reports to recognize such spam going forward but they simply don't appear to do so. Reporting spam doesn't seem to have any result. My channel is large and so is the community and the spam is definitely beginning to do harm. I know this would take some access to YouTube's api which can be gotten but because some of this is available without that kind of access I thought TubeBuddy might be able to do some of it.

 

[TubeBuddy]

There could be multiple ways TubeBuddy could help with SPAM comments. Any or all of these features would be awesome since my channel has a HUGE problem with spam!

1. The ability to delete ALL the comments of a single user on our channel WITH ONE CLICK (as of now, YouTube only lets you delete ONE comment at a time and these bots can post hundreds per day so trying to combat the spam is unrealistically time consuming).

2. Limit the number of comments that can be posted in one hour/day (again, the bots that plague my channel post hundreds at a time and if TubeBuddy had a feature where we could decide the max allowed, that would be helpful).

3. Limit number of comments from new accounts - These spam bots use their software to create new accounts when the others are deleted by YouTubers. This way, a new account (created in the last 48 hours or something like that) could only post 5 comments per day for example for the first week or whatever time frame we saw best.

4. Hide accounts who use certain words on their first post - For example, a ton of the spam comments on my channel say, "I know a powerful man who...." and they are trying to scam people into a "love spell." If there was some type of scan that would delete that comment but also hide the user before other comments could be made, that would be very helpful.

5. Spam reports hide user - As best I can tell, YouTube is overwhelmed with spam reports on comments so they aren't able to do much about it. It TubeBuddy had a way of knowing if an account had its comments reported as spam, an option in TubeBuddy's "Spam Destroyer" could be that when users report spam that the account be hidden from making comments until/unless the account owner marked the comment as legit (unlikely since we all know what spam is).

My channel gets HUNDREDS of spam comments a day where the bots are hard selling scams to my commenters. It's a black eye for my channel that my users complain about and I'm already putting hours a day into trying to simply delete a portion of them and to block who I can. But having to delete each spam comment one by one is an impossible task. HELP TubeBuddy!

We use to have more comment moderation featuers like this, but YouTube started implementing some of them, themselves. YouTube plans to add more of these, so it's on of thos situations if we made them, YouTube already has them planned, so it would make ours obsoluete, and takeaway from something elese we could do. It's a hard situation to be in, but I can see what our dev team thinks!

 

[tennman]

YouTube has been saying they would do more about spam for years now. The steps I mentioned would be easy for them to implement. I really wish TubeBuddy would.