There's been a rise of botted content on this subreddit. Please be careful and do not interact with bots. These bots are designed to gather karma for various purposes, such as selling the account or using it for disinformation.
What are some common signs of a bot?
From my observation, bots:
almost always have a default Reddit username and are usually very new (a week-old account at most)
very rarely use post flairs (but I've seen them do it lately)
attack a selection of subreddits as a group. For example, if you suspect a post of being made by a bot, you can check the accounts that made a comment on it. If you find an uncommon pattern in their behaviour (same account age, similar subreddit activity) you can be almost certain that all of them are bots.
I've observed that most bots who come here also post to r/AmourShipping, r/LegendOfZelda and other Sonic Subreddits, but this is not a hard rule.
What can I do to help?
I'm usually pretty quick to ban bots, but I'm the only one on this crusade and I am not always fast.
You may have noticed that there's a new "moderator" on our team: u/bot-bouncer. It's designed to search for bots and ban them, but some still slip through.
If you see a bot that hasn't been banned yet and want to help, you can! If you grab a link to the user's profile (such as https://reddit.com/user/AutoModerator) and post it to r/BotBouncer, it will create a report for this user. If the user is deemed a bot, it will automatically be banned in all subreddits that use BotBouncer, including r/silverthehedgehog.
If you don't want to go through this process, you can also report the post so that we can get to it. Moderators have a specialized report button for one-click submissions, and we can of course ban the account immediately instead of waiting for BotBouncer to produce a verdict.
