My extension is being targeted by bots.

[Breeze]

I recently disclosed about malicious behavior of a certain extension in a post https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/4REawTGL9Gs/m/Whgpef1TBQAJ

That extension is now taken down. But since then I am experiencing a bombardment of suspicious reviews in my extension emfeppdfcjnldjgmofdkbggeacapegen. Within 2 days, it has received reviews of more than twice of the total previous review count. Most of reviews just put 5 stars and no messages, and have Russian/Indian account names.

There hasn't been a comparable increase of installation count. Also, from chrome-stats.com marking recent reviews as "fake reviews", I am pretty sure that these are posted by bots.

I am not involved in any of those reviews; Whoever is doing this for whatever reason, such a manipulation shouldn't be possible. It hampers me being able to communicate with my users via review section.

I have submitted a developer contact support form, that @Simeon provided yesterday, requesting deleting / blocking fake reviews to the extension, but review count is keep increasing. Have anybody experienced something similar? To CWS representatives, what would be an outcome of such a manipulation?

[Goodboost]

Glad you raise this, I've had my extensions review bombed, both with 1 or 5 stars and text that either says its "Great" or its "Virus".

In one case this has led to my extension being taken down, I guess they also "report bomb", I had to appeal and it was re-instated but it keeps happening.

My take is we should only allow reviews from users that have kept the extension for 5 days + and have registered activity.

[Breeze]

@Goodboost, Thank you for sharing your case. It's a good that your extension is reinstated in the end.

    In one case this has led to my extension being taken down

Was you informed about the reason for the removal, and if so, what was it?

It shouldn't be possible for someone to just bombard reviews and Report Abuse link to have an extension taken down. Maybe, the bot-generated reviews have made a bad impression to reviewers that they were more inclined to conclude a store item to be problematic, @Simeon Vincent has written in response to my previous disclosure that sudden increase of installation strikes more as a sign that something wrong is going on.

That's why I'm reaching out here, we need real humans taking a look at the issue instead of leaving automated system to be abused. In my case, it is blatantly clear that someone else is conducting the abuse in response to my previous action. Reviewers can take account of track records of extension developers in this forum, in CWS review section, or anywhere they have shown public presence to determine good will of the developers.

I don't mind my item's review section for being closed for a while; It is likely that such fake reviewers would have written reviews to many other items, what needs to be done is identifying fake reviewers and deleting their reviews and blocking their accounts.

2021년 10월 1일 금요일 오후 1시 39분 17초 UTC+9에 Goodboost님이 작성:

[Goodboost]

Yes the reason was "manipulating the ranking" etc.. 

I explained that I had noticed non organic reviews and suspicious activity but there wasn't much I could do about it. After 2 weeks and some escalations, the take down was overthrown.

Note that I do buy traffic to my landing pages, making the number of installs highly dependant on how much I spend, so having erratic install numbers is something completely natural, so are bad and good reviews, BUT its very easy to notice sudden increase in Bad or good reviews with texts that are not relevant to your product.

For instance I would promote an Ad Blocker and got a lot of comments of being "Virus", "Impossible to uninstall" etc.. which made no sense.

On the other hand, I usually get around 1x 5 star review per day, but sometimes I would get like 10x 5 stars with very little text, super suspicious.

Note that it did happen multiple times and mainly since May 2021, I had never gotten a take down before.

I also got a take down for bad landing pages, I gave full access to all my landing pages to the reviewers and they were all compliant, still they would not tell me the url of the non compliant one, so I assume someone was sending traffic to my extension with a non compliant url, reported me to take me down.

Other case, someone completely copied the code of one of my extension and added malicious code, then next time I updated mine, it got flagged for copying code ! I had to make many changes to get it approved again. I only assume that my code was used in other extensions which got taken down and so mine was flagged as well.

Trust me I welcome the take down, there is too many malicious actors and non compliant acquisition tactics that kill my CPA, but it has its drawbacks too where compliant dev are impacted too.

[hrg...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, October 2, 2021 at 3:25:28 AM UTC-3 Goodboost wrote:

Note that I do buy traffic to my landing pages, making the number of installs highly dependant on how much I spend

This is explicitly prohibited by the CWS policies. I quote:

User Ratings, Reviews, and Installs: Developers must not attempt to manipulate the placement of any extensions in the Chrome Web Store. This includes, but is not limited to, inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or incentivized downloads, reviews and ratings.  

 

[Goodboost]

You're mistaken buying traffic to landing page AND buying INSTALLS. I do NOT buy INSTALLS. I have banners, that lead to landing page which present the product, then the user clicks ont a CTA button with clear intent and is sent to the CWS. Its all approved.

[hrg...@gmail.com]

I see, it makes sense now.

You pay for advertisement, not for traffic. Paying for traffic to your extension is a violation of the policies.

[Goodboost]

And it happened again on one of my client extension :

Violation reference ID: Yellow Nickel

Violation:

• Manipulating placement of item in the store by modifying ratings, reviews or installs.

Clearly another mistake since there is 6 reviews, only one 5 stars, the rest 2 and 1. Only the 5 star looks legit, the other are down score spam, clearly out of our control (who would purposely down vote his extensions !?)

These take downs have to stop and they should at least engage with us before taking such actions to get to the bottom of it.

[Goodboost]

Just as a follow up to my battle with negative bots, the CWS team answered (within 24h) and reinstated my extension. I wish I knew more about how to prevent this though.

Hello Developer,

Thank you for reaching out to us. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you in this matter. 

Upon subsequent review, we found that your item to be compliant with our “Spam” policy. Your item has been reinstated and will be available in the store shortly. 

We value your contributions to the Chrome Web Store and look forward to working with you.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation,     

Chrome Web Store Developer Support