Freesound Forums

I noticed something since June 12th.
If I put a new sound on freesound.org, this sound is immediately downloaded before the sound appears on the front page.
Who knows that I just uploaded a sound if it hasn't been published yet.
It doesn't take a minute for the sound to be downloaded by the same user.

Since it continues to download 24/7 I think this is a bot.

This is the bot; https://freesound.org/people/linqli/

I don't know if this could be a risk, but I'll just note it.

Indeed ! 1382 sounds downloaded in 3 days and 1 hour looks quite impressive !

Kevin

There is no doubt about it. This is certainly a good find. But I'm more interested in something else. Why are admins silent?

Yes, Up to now, still continues.
I just uploaded a sound some minutes ago, and one user downloaded it already. Guess who ?

Kevin

newlocknew wrote:
There is no doubt about it. This is certainly a good find. But I'm more interested in something else. Why are admins silent?

The will follow this user. I am sure.
Thats why I post my investigations here.
And the great extra effect is that user like you are investigating as well.

"Why are admins silent?"

I don't know for sure, I'm not an admin.
But if I recall correctly, mass downloads is okay, because it could be for a research project etc...
Only there's supposed to be a "API" or something so they'd prefer that than a "user bot".
Maybe it's not that bothering resource wise, and not against the TOS, as long as they respect CC (which I'll be honest I'm sceptic and they're probably not, but innocent until proven otherwise?)
So that's my theory as to why there's no response/enforcement to download bots.

I'm sure admins will correct me if I'm wrong here. Which I might very well be.

Hi everyone,

This is an interesting case. These downloads are not happening through the API because we would have different records for them. I checked some logs and it seems to be a bot that regularly checks the last uploaded sounds (probably using the search page and sorting by date) and downloads new ones. These sounds might not yet be in the front page because the front page updates at a slightly slower rate than the search page.

Even though it is true that such downloads kind of bias the statistics, such usage is probably fine. Also, we don't have resources to manually investigate each of these cases. What could be done in the future is to do some sort of estimation of bot behavior that would allow us to remove bot downloads from download counts, but this is not trivial.

Why are admins silent?

Remember that Freesound is a project run by an incredibly small team at a public university. We have very limited time, and technical maintenance and development takes a big share of it. We check the forums from time to time and try to participate (specially in conversations that we started), but there are many things that we don't read. Sometimes the moderators will send me a private message to draw our attention to a specific topic and then we answer. Feel free to do so when there are relevant discussion in which our input is missing and needed.

Thanks Frederic for the clear answer.

Good afternoon! Frederick. Thanks for the reply. But I would like to understand another thing. Namely, why not just start deleting these bots? There is already an impressive list of them. The fact that they add downloads to statistics is not so noticeable for the average individual user, in my opinion. But the fact that they are essentially stealing sounds is much more unpleasant. Well! I think so.

Hi,

Maybe some of these bots are doing legit downloads, although I agree that people who want to do legit mass downloads should use the API instead. I guess the main reason is that we don't have time to chase these bots. We might be able to prioritize things like that, but then we will have less time to do other things which I guess we believe benefit more the community. I'll discuss however with the others involved and see how they feel about this. If we have a list of known bots I think there should be no problem deleting them.

@cecav16339: Freesound is a project run at a public university, and it is mostly maintained by researchers who spend some of their time on Freesound. I'm spending a lot of time doing Freesound development and maintenance (and many other research and management-related tasks), but still far from full dedication. Also there is a sys admin that spends some time in development and maintenance tasks, but also far from full dedication. We do our best

Hi Frederic,

You can read 2 message from klankbeeld and me listing some suspect profiles in this thread :
https://freesound.org/forum/legal-help-and-attribution-questions/44640/?page=3#thread
I also remember that I’ve read quite recently a post from newlocknew listing some more profiles but I can’t remember in which topic...

Hope it could help !

Wishing you all the best !

Kevin

kevp888 wrote:

I also remember that I’ve read quite recently a post from newlocknew listing some more profiles but I can’t remember in which topic...

Btw

Linqli He stop auto Downloading June 19, 2024

Hi,

Thanks for the information, I'll have a look and discuss with the team what should we do.

OK Frederic, thank you very much !

damiendada wrote:
Hi, is there anything new on this topic?

Strange question to ask when it's all laid out there for you to check.

yeah

Looks like we have this bot here
https://freesound.org/people/shilaiyunzhuan/?

very klik I seen e few downloads. Thats not human.
I filled out a contact form.

regards

with this down-load speed it is only 66 hours to go