topic Re: Automatic Likes in All Things Community

Automatic Likes

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 07:02:55 GMT

There is a user (gbatista) who issues likes to posts immediately upon posting without even being online. Can you please dig into this?

Re: Automatic Likes

Ksharp — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 09:47:38 GMT

Me too !

Re: Automatic Likes

PaigeMiller — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 12:04:26 GMT

Me three!

Re: Automatic Likes

Tom — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:49:56 GMT

There is a button in the email notification for generating likes.

They are probably using that.

Try it with the email you should get from this post and see if it generates a like.

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 19:57:58 GMT

I do suspect it is triggered by the email button. However, it might not be intentional. Looking at their "like" actions it's not as many as I would think if it was an automatic email action. If it gets out of hand we'll see if there is an action to take.

Re: Automatic Likes

SASKiwi — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 20:25:54 GMT

Looks like it only happens for posts in the Programming - SAS Programming Community.

Re: Automatic Likes

Tom — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 20:30:58 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger wrote:

I do suspect it is triggered by the email button. However, it might not be intentional. Looking at their "like" actions it's not as many as I would think if it was an automatic email action. If it gets out of hand we'll see if there is an action to take.

So I clicked the LIKE button in the email and it did indeed bump the LIKE count.

It also opened the page in EDGE browser without actually logging me into the site. I had to login to start making this reply.

So that should explain how someone can like posts without actually logging onto the site.

Re: Automatic Likes

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 09:02:59 GMT

It must be some kind of automatism, I just received a lightning-quick like (see here) that simply cannot be the result of someone receiving mail and clicking "Like" there.

Re: Automatic Likes

Tom — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 16:11:14 GMT

There must be some type of follow option in the forum software that is triggering these automatic likes.

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 16:48:44 GMT

We've seen this before -- it's rare, but somehow for a few people there's something that triggers the "like". When I've looked into it with other affected users, it's not intentional or anything the member is doing to cause it directly. For this one user I've removed the ability to give "likes" so we'll see how that plays out.

Re: Automatic Likes

SASKiwi — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 22:33:43 GMT

The gbatista likes are still happening for me.

Re: Automatic Likes

FreelanceReinh — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 21:44:13 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger wrote:

For this one user I've removed the ability to give "likes" so we'll see how that plays out.

Yet, about 150 new likes have piled up since then. And more evidence that at least not all of them make sense.

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 01:03:14 GMT

Re: Automatic Likes

PaigeMiller — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 12:59:34 GMT

Today, the same problem appears, getting apparent automatic likes from @Jen_Robertson

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 14:20:24 GMT

My theory (yet to be proven) is that something in the email notifications is triggering this (since you can "Like" a message from a link in the email). I've removed that button from the email notices...for now. We'll see if this addresses it.

Re: Automatic Likes

PaigeMiller — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 15:45:56 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger wrote:

My theory (yet to be proven) is that something in the email notifications is triggering this (since you can "Like" a message from a link in the email). I've removed that button from the email notices...for now. We'll see if this addresses it.

No further automatic likes for me today.

Re: Automatic Likes

FreelanceReinh — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:02:17 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger wrote:

I've removed that button from the email notices...for now. We'll see if this addresses it.

The ten most recent likes given by gbatista came after this change.

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 12:12:34 GMT

I see that. I'm tracking this with our platform vendor. Thanks for all of the info!

Re: Automatic Likes

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:56:47 GMT

I think we have this Like thing licked now. But you tell me.

I removed all "Give Likes" actions from the email notification templates. (There was one straggler since the last update.) I haven't seen any "Likes" from the account in question since then. (Unfortunately we lose the convenience of a single-click Like from your email.)

Explanation: with email systems performing more anti-phishing processing before a message hits your inbox, some of these systems (apparently) follow the links to verify they are legit. (That doesn't seem like a sound practice to me...but whatever.) The Like link in an email will apply the Like even without you logging in. I noticed that this user in particular logs in from one geographic region, but all of these "automatic likes" are coming in from another region (Portland, OR). This leads me to believe that their email-anti-phish service is based out of there, and we were seeing the result of this vigorous check.

There were multiple user accounts here that seemed to trigger the "automatic likes", some more than others but the difference is probably due to their subscribed notifications.