Bot watchers - the freedom to comment

Introduction

Commenting on articles in the media and blogs has long become a habit.
Comments are a convenient tool for exchanging opinions between readers, providing feedback to the author and the ability to reflect alternative points of view, etc. Separately, it is worth noting that comments have a significant impact on the perception and evaluation of the information given in the article.
All this works under the condition that adequate users who respect each other’s opinions participate on an equal footing in the process.
However, there are individuals who are not ready to play by the general rules. They are not ready to get along with the fact that normal users peacefully exchange views and information. These individuals also have sufficient resources to break the balance. They set bots and Putin-Jugend at peaceful commentators. The balance is thus broken. At the expense of material resources, the one who has one voice gets the opportunity to significantly influence public opinion.

A tool is needed that would allow rebalancing. Creating a distributed system that is maximally protected from attacks based on the principles of crowdsourcing could have a significant impact on the balance of power. The idea is simple - to give users the opportunity to combine their efforts to fight bots and allow themselves to regulate the community.
Unlike the current practice of authoring moderation of comments, in which each author is forced to independently clean bots from comments, the proposed approach will significantly increase the efficiency of the process (a bot marked by one user will be automatically identified on all other resources). A distributed system will enable many users to combine their efforts and, if not fully restore the balance, then at least complicate the lives of these individuals by raising the average cost of commenting.

Description

The application is implemented as an extension for the Chrome / Chromium browser. Currently only livejournal.com is supported. The application downloads a list of indexes created by users from the central repository. The user can select an index from the list based on the description provided. The selected list is loaded from the user’s repository. The list is a text document in json format.
The parser analyzes the comments on the page. If the list matches, the comment is marked.
Currently only github is supported for storing indexes. It is clear that this is not enough to ensure reliable operation and resistance to attacks. However, using the implementation example for github, you can develop support for other repositories.
The user can create their own index of bots. A pull request is automatically generated for the created index to be added to the general list of indexes.

Examples

The extension offers a number of tools for identifying suspicious commentators. This toolkit is easy to extend with your own algorithm.
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To do this, in the file handler / ljsitehandler.js, you must first add a button with a call to the filtering function

Example:

this.addControl("action_quick_comments_sum_60", "∑=60 sec", this, this.filterTooQuickCommentesSum, 60); 

Where:
"Action_quick_comments_sum_60" - id Buttons
"∑ = 60 sec" - Label Button
this - scope
this.filterTooQuickCommentesSum - filtering function
60 - parameter passed to the filter function (optional)

Example filtering function:

 filterTooQuickCommentesSum: function (delay) { var commentsMap = this.buildUsersGroups(); this.suspects = []; //calculate elapsed time for comments for(var uname in commentsMap) { var ctime_ts = commentsMap[uname]; if (ctime_ts.length > 1){ var sum = 0; var lastComment = ctime_ts[0]; for (var i = 0; i < ctime_ts.length; i++){ sum += ctime_ts[i] - lastComment; lastComment = ctime_ts[i]; } if ((sum/ctime_ts.length) < delay){ if (!_.contains(this.suspects, uname)){ this.suspects.push(uname); } } } }; console.log("list of suspects:" + this.suspects); this.markSelectedUsers(this.suspects); } 

Save, reload the extension in chrome: // chrome / extensions /, test. If you want to share with others do fork / pull request.

As stated above, the application currently only supports LJ. But it is also easy to change.

In the file manifest.json add a page whose support you want to add

 ... "content_scripts": [ ... "matches": ["http://*.livejournal.com/*", "http://*.../*"], ... 

We take ljsitehandler.js as a template, copy and make changes to support your favorite page. You need to rewrite jQuery selectors

In the file content_script.js in line 11 we add the ability to select a parser based on the address of the loaded page.

In manifest.json in the section content_scripts / js add a new parser. We reload the extension in chrome: // chrome / extensions /, we are testing.

Ready to try?
The application is here xreader.github.com/Bot_watchers . You can also find detailed step by step instructions for installation.
PS JS is not my native language I ask for condescension.