[wp-forums] Coded user for sock puppetry

[Stephen Edgar]

Here's another one if someone could block and delete reviews please :)

http://wordpress.org/support/profile/paulnl

(bbPress & BuddyPress do get these quite often)

Also if you could trash this 5 star review of mine that would be awesome too ;)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-time-fan-of-this-plugin-1?replies=1#post-

Technically I replied to one of the said 'sock puppets' review and that user and review has now been deleted but my reply remains :/


Cheers,
 
Stephen Edgar
Melbourne, Australia

Core commiter, contributor & moderator of #bbPress http://bbpress.org
https://profiles.wordpress.org/netweb/   https://twiter.com/netweb 


-----Original Message-----
From: wp-forums [mailto:wp-forums-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Otto
Sent: Thursday, 23 January 2014 12:35 AM
To: For forum moderators. See also http://make.wordpress.org/support/
Subject: Re: [wp-forums] Coded user for sock puppetry

PROTIP: Monitor a few of the more "common" plugins reviews. Examples:
Jetpack, the Tumblr Importer, anything "by WordPress.org".

Frequently, I see a pattern of reviews to these plugins.

1. Worthless, 5 star, "worked great, every1 shuld use" type reviews.
2. New account making them has only 3-5 reviews, which are the only
posts it has ever made.
3. One of these plugins it has reviewed is not like the others... one
of these things just isn't the same...

The idea is to hide the fake review in a tiny pool of seemingly legit
reviews for plugins that get a lot of reviews already and which nobody
would suspect as also being fake reviews..  I see it a lot on the
Tumblr Importer, mostly, because those come up in my feed. But I've
seen it on others as well. But the pattern continually repeats. The
mail.ru domain seems to be common in those accounts as well.

No pattern to the plugins that the faker is trying to build up though,
that seems randomish.

Recommendation: Block account, delete all those false reviews. I find
it about once or twice a week.

-Otto