Hi everyone,
Over the past few days, we've become aware of a minor rule violation by a relatively large number of users in a discord group called ‘Secret Mafia’.
The rule violations were as follows:
Rule 1: “Campaigns encouraging others to upvote or downvote reviews, whether positive or negative are forbidden.”
Despite this rule, authors were sharing their favorite reviews on their novels in an effort to encourage people to upvote the reviews they deemed favorable for their story, or, to upvote the reviews they wrote for someone else in that very same group
This caused those manipulated reviews to become the first reviews on their fiction page sorted by ‘top rated’. As opposed to organic reviews with organic up and down votes that would have normally taken those slots.
This also caused these reviews to hit the ‘Top Review’ list on the front page, which allowed this group to mostly dominate that list, taking up valuable space on the home page illegitimately.
Rule 2: A concentrated effort to get review swaps on fictions without the review swap symbol. As you likely know, review swaps have a mark that makes it clear that the review was written as part of a review swap between two authors. In this case, the group worked to avoid the tag by doing the following:
Review swapping with alternate accounts.
Doing a 3-way review swap, meaning account A reviews the fiction of account B, account B reviews the fiction of account C, and account C reviews the fiction of account A. By doing the above, they violated the trust behind the system between them and their readers and they potentially violated other review swap rules in the process.
As much as we could tell from our initial investigation, these were generally (...)
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