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Introduction

Steemcleaners know that communities are a crucial part of the Steem ecosystem. We are readjusting our sights to make sure that we serve communities. In this readjustment, we aim for mutual collaboration.

Communities suffer from plagiarists, ID thieves and other types of scammers. Curation bots fall victim to those, draining valuable resources from genuine users.

@Steemcleaners will start including communities as a focal point to keep them abuse-free.

This contribution shows the results of a recent Steemcleaners survey. It also discusses what insight we gained from it.

This will be the first part of an ongoing series. Future posts will detail the progress in engaging the community in abuse remediation.

Post Body

Key Concepts

• Community support
• Mutual collaboration
• Abuse reduction and prevention

Stakeholder Input Requested

Stakeholder consultation is the first part of any project.

We asked some of the community leaders to provide their input via a short survey. The survey questions are about the @steemcleaners and @spaminator scope. The survey also covered community feedback and collaboration ideas.

A total of 41 community leaders were asked over Discord or Steem.chat to fill out the survey. We apologise is we missed your community and invite you to reach out to us if you wish to fill it out.

To date, we received 32 completed surveys in return.

Feedback

Overall, the survey results were encouraging. Stakeholders provided honest, constructive feedback. Below is a random selection of responses (anonymous).

Q: How important is fighting abuse to yourself as a community leader?
Scale from 1 (Not Important) to 5 (Very Important)

28 out of 32 community leaders responded with 5. 4 out of 32 community leaders responded with 4.

Q: How do you envision collaborating with the Steemcleaners team to support your community?

A: "We work to pass on large scale abusers to SC, as well as work off their reporting to restrict access to our resources"

A: "It shall be a mutual collaboration. If our community does something wrong we shall know about it and act accordingly. Also if we see something we shall inform steemcleaners to have a common level of knowledge."

A: "support by reporting issues within scope and offering data where necessary to back up claims and flagging where needed"

A: "Making a space that you have guides for new users of steemit"

A: "i think steemcleanners was Limited because i seen steemcleaners community has only three places 1. steemit, 2.discord, 3.steemcleaners site. are you think its enough? no its not enough. my suggestion was steemcleaners needs to expand their roots. and i think first target was discord servers. steemcleaners team need to join every servers and need to provide your flag service to every users. and i think discord flag bot was enough for this. you can provode your bot to every server. and every users can use this bot. after this innovation, we can make spam free blockchain."

Q: Do you have any feedback (Good & Bad) for @steemcleaners?

A: "I think that steemcleaners has improved significantly over the last year."

A: "I wish you all had more resources to work with, i.e. an actual full on staff to filter posts and comments more efficiently. I know you all work hard but there is still things that fall through the cracks. Maybe a team dedicated to new users specifically?"

A: "My concern is sometimes you're going after smaller account and letting whales get away with w/e"

A: "We differ in some nuanced opinions to what should be flagged, but overall it's a force for good!"

A: "1. Improving the comments for permanently banned users by adding sample sources. 2. Publish more often informative, human friendly, posts on top of the daily reports."

Please note that submissions that named an account or entity in their response were omitted from the above snapshot due to privacy reasons as to guarantee their anonymity.

Actionable Findings

The main take away is that we need more community support documentation. That includes guidance documents for new users. It also includes discussions over what is abuse, and creation of related resources. Multilingual support is a subject that has come up again and again. We need to help those who don't speak and write English.

@Steemcleaners can assist with removing plagiarists and other abusers from communities. Community leaders are generally supportive of this fact. Preventing abusers from exploiting their projects is a necessity.

Takeaway for Community Leaders

Community leaders and members should continue to report abusers via the @steemcleaners website. The contact form is here: http://steemcleaners.com/reports/new

Reporting abuse is very simple. The form is instinctive and in cases where an incorrect abuse type is picked, we adjust it to the correct one at the point of review. The quicker abuse is reported the faster we can deal with it. In many cases, the abuse is unintentional. But more than often, particularly as community curation bots gain traction, accounts that tailor to farming them arise.

Types of Abuse Under Steemcleaners' Scope

The following is a brief guide of different abuse types that are prominent within communities:

• Plagiarism: Posting someone else's work without giving them credit. Subtypes of this include spinning (rewriting to avoid detection) and translation (translating from other languages without giving credit).
• Image Plagiarism: Posting someone else's art or photography and tagging it with an artistic tag (ie. photography, art, or the name of a specific contest or artistic community). This is the most common type of abuse that disrupts communities.
• Tag Abuse: Using community or curation tags in order to trick the automatic curators into granting upvotes on irrelevant posts. This drains the curation accounts and dilutes the rewards to legitimate users.
• ID Deception/Theft: Stealing someone's identity or creating a false identity with the information real individuals.
• There are many other types of abuse, some more common than others. Please refer to the links at the bottom of this post for additional guidelines.

The image above is what our internal interface looks like. As you can see in any given time frame we handle a wide range of abuse. Where reports are unfounded or out of scope, we reject them.

Helpful Links

This is a list of @steemcleaners posts that community leaders and managers can refer their members to now for additional guidance and helpful suggestions:

Tagging: https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/the-game-of-tags
Citation: https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/the-importance-of-citation
Blacklist: https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/appealing-the-blacklist
Phishing: https://steemit.com/security/@steemcleaners/phishing-attacks-and-recovery
Commenting: https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/the-art-of-commenting

Resources

Discord Channel

https://discord.gg/YR2Wy5A

Website

http://steemcleaners.com/

Future Posts

We will provide an update once the community engagement project reaches a comfortable level of traction. We are aiming at a progress report at least once a quarter.

Our next post will cover both project highlights and challenges as well as focus on anti-abuse metrics.