Why are there so many spam comments?

[Yorth]

That's a yikes from me...

[Crusoe]

Yeah, tapas usually has systems in place to check for spam, but sometimes there's an uptick in it. Best to just block the users and try to ignore it.

[crisyah]

That's the exact same one I got lmao!!!

[Yorth]

Wow, it's nice to see a fellow "he did not just go there" author. We seem to be an increasingly common breed, lmao

[cherrystark]

I think all the novelstar spam is sad. The spam comments even went as far as my inactive booksie account. I looked Novelstar up and it's a real app on the playstore. They were advertising the popular romance stuff: werewolves, mafia, billionaires, etc, but most of the reviews were able how few stories there were. A lot of authors are going to stay away before of their stupid spam comments.

[Yorth]

They seem to have that growth at all cost mentality. If they had a dollar, they would much rather spend it on advertisement to get new users in than to develop their very veryyy buggy app. Just posting my story using their trash editor has been an absolute nightmare. It crashes at the most random clicks and touches.

[cherrystark]

Yikes. I definitely agree, fix the app and then start advertising.

[sushy00]

I haven't had those yet

[Yorth]

wow, for a comic as large as yours that is seriously weird. I guess they target novels more than comics because that's what their website is for

[therosesword]

Those "Novelstar" things are showing up everywhere.

[therosesword]

For me, if companies advertise like that... nope, not going there. It's a total turn off.

[C-Gamsby]

I got a comment like that, and I too was a flutter when I saw someone left a comment. Though it does say if I use the service I can 'make big bucks...'

[Ordinaryaverageguy]

Haven't gotten that particular spam (yet) but I did get a flood once of comments on every episode... it was "come see my sexy website" spam.

[Kaydreamer]

Is this just happening to novels, or is it happening to comics as well? I haven't had any such comments, and I dread receiving any. It sounds like a right pain in the bum.

[cherrystark]

So far just novels I think. A lot of the comments start with something like "Oh wow! I wonder what's going to happen next" or "Oh no he didn't" before jumping into a short spiel about bringing our talent to novelstar.

[Kaydreamer]

Icky. That's so frustrating... I hope Tapas may be able to incorporate some sort of keyword filter in their comments script which blocks comments containing words such as 'novelstar' in order to cut down on this spam.

[cherrystark]

It would be nice but I doubt something like that can happen. The spammers would just change their code, like all the pornbot spam we got hit with a few months ago. Before novelstar, I remember seeing bots for x novel, y novel, stuff like that.

[jkb4753]

I was not here for the pornbot spam. How did they get rid of it?

[cherrystark]

I'm not sure, they probably just adapted the code. The important thing is block them and report issues like this to feedback@tapas.io. From my experience, reporting issues through those channels will help get it to the developers' queue a lot faster than posting general comments. With more examples, the faster they can fix it.

[AnimeKitty]

Novel Star seems to be the most desperate. Honestly, my guess is a lot of the users are from that app and create accounts here to get you to join their shitty app. I got a post from one recently that shared a Facebook link for their writing competition or whatever, and the posts from that account have hundreds of positive comments. Yet they all have that robotic vibe to them. Feel free to check it out if you'd like. Just search Novel Star on Facebook. Don't wanna share their links around. They'd probably love that.

I used to assume that all these are just mere bots who won't reply, but a while back on Wattpad, I played around and messaged one of them (from a different app) about how it goes against guidelines to spam. Turns out she was a very defenseless and manipulative person. Went on about how I ruined her night and she loved my story, which she couldn't even be bothered name or show she read it, and only wanted to help me make money. Anything that reaches out to people like this is highly unprofessional and only makes the app worse.