Steemit.com has evolved over the last year and with it so has @steemcleaners. We thought it was time to update our abuse guide.

Defined Abuse Scope

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• Plagiarism & Original Content
• Copy & Paste - Posts include source and copy more than a couple of paragraphs.
• Tag Spam
• Identity Theft/Deception
• Known User Verification
• Comment Spam
• Malware/Virus/Phishing and other Attack Vectors

Image by @atopy

Plagiarism & Original Content

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If it is not your work don’t let others believe it is. This includes any content including music, images and artwork. We don’t focus on copyright issues so much as look at it from the plagiarism and original content angle.

Plagiarism is the act of copying or stealing someone else's words or ideas and passing them off as your own work.

Source

Publishing posts with content from ghostwriters is a bit of a grey area. If you are paying someone to write content for your posts it is your responsibility to make sure they are not plagiarizing. Adding a ghostwriter byline would be a good idea.

Copy & Paste Posts

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While we don’t look at this from a copyright angle, if you are copying and pasting posts that are not created by you it is still frowned upon. While we may not flag outright on immediate offenses, continued copy & paste posts could be seen as spamming without contributing to the community.

Tag Abuse & Tag Spam

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Tag Abuse is the occasional misuse of a tag. If you are writing a post about cats do not use the tag dog. This helps users find relevant content.

Tag Spam is a term we use for two situations:

• A user repeatedly uses an irrelevant but popular tag in order to garner more attention - e.g. introduceyourself
• A user or group of users post a large number of spam posts making it impossible for any other posts to be seen.

Contest, Curation, and other tags created for a specific purpose.

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When tags are created for a specific purpose such as #colorchallenge please notify a member of @steemcleaners with a link to the post introducing the tag as well as any guidelines. We will be happy to create a specific comment template to respond to those abusing the tag.

Existing tags cannot be appropriated for the use of any one person or group. Tags such as the names of cities, states, and countries are available for anyone to use as long as the topic of the post is relevant. If you wish to use a tag for curation purposes, for example, you need to create a new (and non-generic) tag. For example, @patrice introduces and outlines the use of the #minnow-guide tag here.

Identity Theft/Deception

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Identity Theft - This should be fairly obvious.

Identity Deception - Do not write posts claiming to be someone you are not. This also includes writing posts in such a way that you deceive your audience.

The most common deceptions:

• Creating the steemit account @xyz and copying posts from xyz.com exclusively
• Posting photography and art from a single artist and claiming the art as your own creation or letting the community believe it is.
• Using images of someone other than yourself and leading the reader to believe that the photo is a picture of yourself.

Identity/Content Verification

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Identity & Content Verification Guide: When to Ask and When Not To is still relevant today. Last week we introduced Introducing Identity/Content Verification Reporting & Lookup as a tool for contributors, curators, and @steemcleaners to track who has verified their Identity and/or content.

Image by @atopy

Comment Spam

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Comment spam is currently defined by @steemcleaners as:

• 10 or more generic comments per day that are not in response to a question posed by the post or comment. “Thanks”, “Great Post!”, “Nice”, “Follow me”, etc
• Commenting on old posts to hide self up-votes or a voting trail.
• Copy/Paste comments that serve no purpose or the purpose is self promotion.
• Comments that inform the contributor that they have been up upvoted, resteemed, or flagged when the curator does not actually upvote, resteem, or flag the post.
• Unsolicited and off topic referral links.

Comment spam that is not actionable by @steemcleaners:

• Novelty Bots or Comments that do not spam. E.g. @ionlysaymeep, @iliketoast
• Bots or Users advertising a service. E.g. @resteembot
• Bots or Users posting information or welcoming new users in the tag #introduceyourself
• Bots or Users posting notices of actions taken such as an upvote, flag, tip or resteem. E.g. @cheetah, @minnowsupport, @tipu, @resteem.bot

Malware/Virus/Phishing and other Attack Vectors

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Any of these can compromise the security of Steemian’s account(s), computer, or steemit.com itself.

Other types of abuse @steemcleaners deals with indirectly

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There are several types of abuse that the @steemcleaners account does not deal with directly but the members of @steemcleaners will provide support or advice as individuals.

• Hate Speech, Personal Attacks, & Harassment
• Rogue Bots
• Downvote Abuse

Hate Speech, Personal Attacks, & Harassment

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While we don’t intervene directly with the @steemcleaners account, please report any instances to #steemitabuse for help and advice from volunteers.

Rogue Bots

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If you run across a rogue bot report it to @steemcleaners in #steemcleaners-public and we’ll do our best to track down its owner.

Downvote Abuse

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Fair Downvotes:

• Curator disagrees with the content of a post or comment
• Curator finds the content of a post contains ‘abuse’ such as plagiarism.

Unfair Downvotes:

• Curator wishes to harm steemit by downvoting contributors posts.
• Curator wishes to harm an individual or specific group of users by downvoting contributors and/or supporters posts.

Grey Area Downvotes

• Retaliation downvotes

Report downvote abuse in #steemitabuse or to a member of @steemcleaners. Members of @steemcleaners are free to evaluate the situation and act as they believe is necessary.

If you downvote someone because you don’t agree with the content of their post be aware that they may flag back. Provided the weight of the downvoting involved is proportional there is no reason to report it.

If you start a downvote war with someone we may provide advice on how to resolve the dispute but we are not here to mediate disputes.

Community Involvement, Community Support, & Transparency.

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We have worked hard over the last year to ‘keep steemit clean’ with the support of the community. @patrice has had some recent discussions with individuals on @steemcleaners role in the community. Some have felt that we do not listen to feedback and concerns from the community.

If you have legitimate concerns regarding our scope of abuse please share your concerns with @patrice with @patrice by mentioning her on Discord in #steemcleaners-public or steemit.chat.

Abuse Guide Updates

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This guide is currently incomplete. It is missing at least one important scope that we are discussing internally at the moment. To keep the community informed we will be posting and updating the guide on our website steemcleaners.org. We will publish a full guide here once a year and major changes as they are introduced. Minor changes will not be posted on

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1 Million SP Delegation

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In the recent weeks we received a large delegation of SP to combat abuse. With that delegation comes responsibility, a responsibility we take seriously. This account will no longer upvote any comments or posts. Our voting power is reserved for downvoting abuse.