YouTube Help My channel was spam attacked by a YT bot farm! What do I do?

[The Jungle Explorer]

So I woke up this morning to hundreds of comments on my videos. At first, I was happy, until I realized, this was a bot farm attack on my channel. Someone sicked a bot farm on my channel. Now, all the comments were positive, but if YT thinks I did this, it could be bad. Why would someone do this to me? What should I do about it?

 

[MattCommand1]

So I woke up this morning to hundreds of comments on my videos. At first, I was happy, until I realized, this was a bot farm attack on my channel. Someone sicked a bot farm on my channel. Now, all the comments were positive, but if YT thinks I did this, it could be bad. Why would someone do this to me? What should I do about it?

YT will not think you did it. They have the technical means to check out which accounts are behind it and where it came from.

Generally, the spambots will leave behind a weird-looking link that doesn't look like a link. Those are to be squashed ASAP.

Personally, I think you should permanently block these accounts. If you let them in with the "good comments", the "bad stuff" may not be far behind. It could be they are testing the waters with your account.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

Personally, I think you should permanently block these accounts. If you let them in with the "good comments", the "bad stuff" may not be far behind. It could be they are testing the waters with your account.

This is a good idea. I am used to the spambots that post links on my videos. I have hyperlinks blocked and several keywords blacklisted, so they seldom get through. But this attack was different. it was just all one-word comments like, WOW. WONDERFUL, NICE, GREAT, etc, etc. The comments were all posted on my last three videos from a bunch of different accounts.

It makes no sense why anyone would do this. What could they possibly hope to gain from it? It just seems like the only purpose could be to try to get me in trouble.

 

[MattCommand1]

It makes no sense why anyone would do this. What could they possibly hope to gain from it? It just seems like the only purpose could be to try to get me in trouble.

Just speculation on my part, but as I said, they are probably testing the waters of your account with "safe" words/phrases. They may follow-up with actual spam links next time.

Or it's possible they are trying to fool YT into thinking that they have a "good account" to spam someone elsewhere later. I've seen YT automatically shut down spammers to my account before I ever got to the spam comment. The spam comment was gone before I had a chance to respond which tells me YT is on the job in trying to stop this nonsense.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

Just speculation on my part, but as I said, they are probably testing the waters of your account with "safe" words/phrases. They may follow-up with actual spam links next time.

Or it's possible they are trying to fool YT into thinking that they have a "good account" to spam someone elsewhere later. I've seen YT automatically shut down spammers to my account before I ever got to the spam comment. The spam comment was gone before I had a chance to respond which tells me YT is on the job in trying to stop this nonsense.

Man, this is gonna take some work! Whew! I am blocking each user and removing the message they left, but It is gonna take hours to get through them all.

 

[MattCommand1]

Man, this is gonna take some work! Whew! I am blocking each user and removing the message they left, but It is gonna take hours to get through them all.

If you have that many, it might be just easier to block the accounts and leave the comments behind.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

I agree... ban, block and remove as much as possible. There is a possibility this is malicious; without divulging specifications I have heard stories of this sort of thing affecting someone's channel. If the problem becomes too outrageous get in touch with @TeamYouTube on Twitter, they seem pretty helpful in cases like this.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

I agree... ban, block and remove as much as possible. There is a possibility this is malicious; without divulging specifications I have heard stories of this sort of thing affecting someone's channel. If the problem becomes too outrageous get in touch with @TeamYouTube on Twitter, they seem pretty helpful in cases like this.

Yeah, that is what I am doing. Most of the accounts are new, created in the last few months. A few have been from 2019 and one was from 2013. Most are blank (no content or profile pic) and have Arabic-sounding names (Hassim, Islam, Yadin, etc). There is one that the spammer put some effort into. This one is set up like a real channel. But is just one month old and features a bunch of shorts from one Indaian guy. I bet the spammer stole all these clips from some Indian creator since YT has now opened up all content for people to make shorts out of.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

WHEW! All done. Man, what a chore. Thanks for the advice guys. This was a first for me, and it had me worried. Now if YT sees what happened, they will see that I took action against this and hopefully know that it was not me who instigated it. I hope. My channel is hurting bad enough already. I don't need anything else to happen to it.