Programming

TLDR: I created a script that blocks accounts (bots) that mass follow other accounts.

Recently, Ive been noticing an uptick in followers to my account. Which is awesome....except they all seem to be bots. All the bots have a few things in common:

1. They all have basically no GitHub contributions other than a couple of forks of popular projects.
2. They mass follow people (think like 10k or more people).

Theres a couple of theories floating around on why these accounts are doing this, but here are a couple of ideas others have given:

https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1dlslpj/what_is_the_point_of_github_follow_bots/

But either way, i decided to see how many of these bots were attached to my account. So I looked for accounts that had more than 5000k followers (which is about 10x times the number of follows I gave out). I found that around 20% of all accounts that followed me were bots. I then rigged up a block and vola! It removed 30 accounts first run and is set to run every night on a GH action.

In order to use you can fork, get the GH Token, and then it auto-blocks the accounts. Feel free to comment out the block if you want to see what a dry run looks like.

I hope GitHub themselves will start doing something about these accounts. But for now, my script seems to work.

Mirror is here: https://yuno.chrisco.me/git/michael/anti-mass-follow-bot in case the github link dies someday.