Dear @PuttItOut and fellow voaters,

Some of you may know of me as someone who likes to troll and shitpost from time to time. This message is not like that. I am 100% serious.

I became a voater during The Fattening. I’ve been on here ever since and I haven’t looked back. I love it here. The whole community here is the best online community I’ve been a part of. I’ve been posting a lot and doing my best over the past few months to try and help smaller subs gain attraction. I think it was back in January when I discovered voat had a chat again. There were chats when I originally came to voat, but those had been removed. I went to check out chat and ended up liking it there. Over time I grew to like the people who were in chat regularly. Like @DecimateTheWeak says in the comments on this thread, it may sound kind of lame, but talking to people for months almost daily results in people becoming friends.

Back then we could post pictures inline in chat. There were two users that would spam war each other back and forth. These users were @totesmcgoats and the infamous @SaneGoatiSwear. Totesmcgoats would spam this image: WARNING: EXTREMELY NSFW. Sane would spam trannies or something. Later Putt pushed an update that removed inline images. It was around this time that the account @SaneGoatsISwear (I’ll call him fake sane in this post) was created. Take a look at this users comments. He spams the same exact image totes spammed in chat.

Fake Sane began spamming chat with some copypasta about “microwaving shit” and “nigger trannies”. This became too much for people to handle at some points so I created and off site chat (NOT on Discord). We would share the link to the chat via PM to people we trusted from voat chat so that the spammer would not find us there.

To combat this spamming, Putt implemented chat restrictions. The restrictions for each user is 5 posts per 25 seconds and no repeating the same message twice in a row. The spammer ended up getting around this pretty easily. It seems that the person behind the spam account wrote a script to spam chat. The messages would cycle between about 6 or so different messages. The messages were long and the spammer eventually started to use multiple accounts to spam chat.

Putt combatted this by having @Cynabuns ban the spam accounts from /v/whatever. This bans them from the chat as well as the sub. However, Cynabuns can’t watch chat 24/7 and the spammer just started using different accounts.

Then it happened… Putt made CCP requirements for chat. This creates a problem for multiple reasons. The spammer will easily be able to get around it. 100 CCP doesn’t take long to get and after either deleting the comments or letting them sit for 7 days, people will no longer be able to downvoat him. This thread proves that this is possible and easy to do.. However, there is a bigger issue. Like I mentioned in the beginning there are people who a regulars on chat. If you go on there daily you’ll always see most of the same people. @MightyYetGentle, who now goes by the name @Michael_Obama, is one of the people I would talk to regularly. I went to check his CCP right after I found out there were CCP restrictions at that time he was at 111. I checked a little over an hour later and he was at 82. That day he only made 6 comments. They had each garnered a couple downvoats but not enough to drop him that much. Older comments had to be getting downvoated. MYG has a lot of enemies on voat, partially because he has a little bit of a hostile personality. He seems to have been brigaded, if this is the case then it is worse than a spammer. This means if you have relatively low CCP you can just be brigaded out of chat.

Here’s MYG’s PV thread on this: https://voat.co/v/ProtectVoat/1848550

Here’s @beatlejuiceX3 saying that MYG is “worth of D.C. Brigade”: https://i.imgtc.com/KoqJSgd.png

Here’s a very suspiciously downvoated comment (He just answered a guy’s question on image hosts and got downvoated.): https://voat.co/v/AskVoat/1845796/9035762 archive: https://archive.fo/ejUMa

So, what happened next was MYG created a discord chat. There’s a lot of people on it. Basically all the voat chat regulars are on it. Like I said in the beginning we’ve been talking to each other for months and now a group of users downvoat brigades someone so that we are unable to talk to each other in voat chat?!

Last night I logged in and saw this thread calling the Discord server a honey pot: https://voat.co/v/whatever/1856839

Look at the OP of that thread: @sound_of_siIence (note “silence” is spelled with a capital “I” and that the users only posts are about the discord server.) Guess what? @sound_of_silence (spelled correctly with a lowercase “L”) has been a voat chat regular for at least 2 months now. The OP of that Discord thread is pretending to be a different user and fucking with all of voat.

@PuttItOut, I hope you read this. Some person or group is out to get voat. Based on the popularity of the Discord posts and the site being banned, it seems that this group is winning.

If you took the time to read this huge post, thank you.

- oiseaulibre