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Brand new user with one model shows up in the number one position of the “popular this month” on his first day. Obviously he has created over 300 fake accounts. He has used these to boost downloads, likes, and followers.
His model is incomplete with only a placeholder part.
GrabCAD, how is this even possible?
The GrabCAD score and popular this month need a serious overhaul. Not to mention the method by which new accounts can be created.
https://grabcad.com/library/assembly-machine-for-installing-plugs-on-pipe-parts-1
It seems that all her likes are from "singapore" and "double zero" users (0 models, 0 followers)...
11,930,000 engineers with over 5,660,000 free CAD files.
Grabcad and its parent Stratasys seen to be inflating numbers, wonder if they are looking to try and sell GC or maybe they are trying to sell everything?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/makes-stratasys-ssys-lucrative-takeover-113311681.html
The only way 100's of account could be created in 1 day would definitely require GrabCad management knowledge.
Nothing will be done, if they had real concerns, they would probably have to delete 1 million accounts. If not more, not good for the bottom line.
Hence the reason GrabCad will NEVER allow the community to police the site.
One could delete their models and account, yet GC would probably just make up new accounts and repost all your work anyway.
Let's face it management has little concern and allow theft when you still actually have an account.
What to do I wonder?
He even shows up on page one for the high scoring engineers this month. He might have gotten by with this if he hadn’t gone over the top with it.
The name of the uploaded file is:
Download Free From EngineeringDL.com_automatic assembly machine
This ties in very well with GrabCAD not wanting to answer if we are allowed to upload models from other CAD-websites.
An additional oddity is that the user has 314 (fake?) followers, but all of 657 downloads, all in only 2 days or so. Who does the active downloading of this random model benefit? Is it all just GrabCAD testing their own system?
It benefits engineeringDL.com
It puts their model at the top of page one and no doubt generates a lot of click throughs. Just one successful sale of a machine like this makes this whole endeavor worthwhile. Other than a little time to generate the code that automatically did all this, it’s free advertising.
The model is now hidden. (Not deleted.) No doubt because of direct reports. Mr Blue is still there along with all the fake accounts.
"His" 314 followers !!!!! (unbelieveble) have to wait for something "new"...
It seems that many/most? of his followers are members at EngineeringDL.com under that same fake names. And EngineeringDL.com is in fact a competitor to GrabCAD, that tries to make users pay for access.
Why is GrabCAD not worried?
They don't give a Sh..t, as long as we (frequently) stumble across their commercial ads for printersoftware or whatever else they wanna sell us..
I wonder if Nano Dimensions is aware of all the fake accounts.
After all they are buying an asset based on metrics like that?
Hi.
Just like any other website on the internet, we are constantly fighting with spam such as this. For this, we have several automated anti-spam blocking systems and we are constantly trying to improve them.
Somehow this user managed to bypass them and create multiple spam accounts. We will look into this. Sorry for the inconvenience.
... but Mr Blue is still active?!?
And all his fake followers are also still up :-(
That user has only one content: a model, which I completely hidden from the website before. For any further action, we need to investigate more first.
Oh, you don't want to delete all those nice fake accounts? GrabCAD is all about numbers, aren't you? Amazing :-(
I never said that. For simpler cases, we delete the spamming user immediately, as we have done in the past.
For cases like this where multiple accounts were created, we have to investigate before we delete.
Also keep in mind that the statistics displayed on our website such as user or model count does not include deleted (spam) contents.
But surely, you can see that Mr Blue's followers are fake; all accounts made within a week of each other, all from Singapore, all inactive, most names are very contrived, non-asian, many of them are also members at EngineeringDL.com and finally, almost half are female names and we all know that there are very few female GrabCADers.
Q.E.D.
Thank you for helping us with the investigation :) (I was aware of some of these already)
The problem is, we area also trying to figure out how our system was abused so we can prevent it from happening. When we delete the user, user data is also lost and it makes it harder to investigate. Also, deleting dozens/hundreds of users from the production system is a delicate job, so we have to make sure we are not deleting any similar-looking but legit users by mistake.
Avoiding the deletion of legitimate accounts among thousands of fake accounts is a problem derived from acting late on a situation (it's like doing "corrective" maintenance when something breaks, instead of "preventive" before it happens).
I think it is better to propose a more robust account creation system. For example, one that requests a phone number to which an SMS is sent with a certain validation code. If the way of registering is more robust, the root problem is eliminated before it becomes massive and difficult to solve on a large scale.
PD: In fact, I think that genuine GrabCAD users would be very happy to participate in an "account update" campaign in which a phone number is requested in order to receive an "account validation code" which, if not received at a certain time, generate a concealment of the account and its galleries, to later proceed directly to its final cancellation!
Thank you for your feedback and I agree.
As I mentioned before, although not always enough, we already have multiple preventive measurements. Later this year we are planning to bring more authentication options and verifications.
Oh, yes. This is sorely needed.
Also, why not let dormant accounts expire after 1-2 years, just like most other websites (Adobe, Behance, etc.) do?
Oh, my bad! its all about inflating the number of users :-(
Yeah, let us deactivate the bomb that already exploded.
For us engineers means post operative planning. Works very good everywhere and it's the cheapest method by far ;-).
Stuff like this is getting easier with sites like fiver . com... You can pay a few bucks for thousands of likes on social media sites. Smartphone 'farms' that generate bulk likes & clicks have become the new big business in call centers... Of course, China & India are the prime offenders.
If you don't receive the email within an hour (and you've checked your Spam folder), email us as confirmation@grabcad.com.
