Growing concerns of Ballot Box Stuffing from bots/spammers. Please do something about it.. | XM Community
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Growing concerns of Ballot Box Stuffing from bots/spammers. Please do something about it..

  • 21 September 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 101 views

Hello. I am a university student and I am writing this post because of a growing concern I have. For safety concerns I will keep my identity and school private. For some time, there have been hackers who use bots to basically spam as much responses as possible for either monetary or raffle purposes.

I and people I know have posted research studies on various sites and almost every time it has been spammed by bots. It is getting to a point where it is not possible anymore to post anything due to the fear of being spammed. This is a growing concern not only to myself, but to others who rely on your site and many others to get accurate results.

This is why I am posting this, to let you be aware of the problem. Whoever is spamming has no sense or respect and is doing what they want despite knowing their responses are obvious. I am asking, to find a way to stop those who use bots almost every time, or find a way to limit them. Almost every week I hear stories of how there's hundreds, or thousands of responses for every survey and that is the problem. I even heard stories of people filing police reports, but nothing is being done about it. You think the police will go door to door and waste their time with this situation? They won't stop. They don't care about the consequences nor they think that they won't catch on. They think it is a game, and it's time that someone has to say something about it. I, and others are pleading with you, your company to please update your software, add attention checks, add captchas, anything to reduce and lower the responses of spam. Not just your company, as I know many schools and other companies use your program to gain results. This is a growing issue of integrity of research and something has to be done about it. Please take my concerns seriously, and find a solution to come up with how to stop and prevent this in the future. Thank you.
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Best answer by JenCX 23 September 2019, 21:52

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3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +27
Qualtrics has a captcha question you can add to your surveys.

There are also a number of other things you can do to identify bots. One example is discussed here:
https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/1623/deleted
Thanks for your response.

I am aware there is captcha but still they somehow find a way to bypass it. I'm just suggesting more ways to prevent spamming from bots, because it's out of control.
Userlevel 7
Badge +11
There's an interesting 'honey pot' thread you might want to look at here, which I think is related to the one that Tom mentioned. Also, in addition to captcha, you and your colleagues can program in attention checks.

You can also check out the additional Fraud Detection tools here.

Finally, using reputable sources for your respondents such as Prolific can help. This is an ongoing problem but there are tools to use to reduce fraud.

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