Freesound Forums
download bots
Started June 15th, 2024 · 65 replies · Latest reply by Sadiquecat 1 day, 23 hours ago
yeah happens to me and makes me feel rather disappointed. like oh looks! i uploaded a sound and it has ten downloads after a day!
[looks and sees they all are a few days old and have thousands of downloads]
I found out a reason why download bots are BAD
I think they are trying to crash the pages of the sounds they are downloading, if they mass-download or mass-comment I think on someone's sound, eventually that page will crash because just like on scratch, if you spam and mass comment on someones profile, their page will crash.
kevp888 wrote:
Probably the record holder ?
You'd think so, but another account https://freesound.org/people/yuchen22314/ holds that dubious honour with over 4 million downloads. However someone else already reported it so I didn't mention it.
theres only 3 reasons why these people are mass downloading sounds
1: crash page
2: download for no reason
3: download speedrun record
Yes, right, I remember we had talked about this user (and some others) having a huge number of downloads some months ago.
That’s crazy to see how many sounds these bots have downloaded, and I wonder how they may affect the download statistics published by freesound every year ?
Wishing you all the best !
Kevin
That's it! They trying to change the yearly download statistics! But the reason could be for the good; people who don't use freesound see these statistics, wonder how many people found this website useful, and then they join freesound, or for the bad; people who don't use freesound know these are just bot downloads, think *in mind: wow freesound does a lot of mass bot downloads to make their website look good, im not joining*, and freesound is seen as a bad website, i really hope these bots stop downloading.
I think it's probable the bots are actually downloading the sounds for their content be it just someone hoarding sounds, or someone wanting to re-upload elsewhere.
And that if a bot is re-downloading the same sounds multiple times, it's because it's poorly programmed.
Not sure there's much insensitive to make freesound look good or bad though download bots. People wanting to do that would probably have bots spamming nice comments on sounds, or hatred in the forum.
So far, it's more of DM's and spam comments for casinos x')
No, for blind people like me, captcha are awful !
In my opinion,, a reasonable limit of 300 to 500 downloads per day could prevent bots activity, but until our sounds aren’t reposted on some other websites infringing copyright, these bots aren’t doing illegal things.
There would only be a problem if the bots were aiming to crash the website or degrade its overall performance, but it seems this is not really the case, as frederic.font explained earlier in this thread.
Wishing you all the best !
Kevin
And another:
https://freesound.org/people/liuxiang/
4799 sounds downloaded, user for 12 hours, 41 minute
A bot or not. At least a user downoad by number order.
But probably not illegal.
DeepSeek ?? 
gis_sweden wrote:
Where do all the downloaded files end up???
klankbeeld wrote:
DeepSeek ??
It is possible that they are being used to train some sort of AI, which would need vast amounts of data, which Freesound has, although usually the AI models are for music generation and Freesound is more for sound effects. It also doesn't explain why they needed so many accounts to do it and why some have so many more downloads than others. It doesn't seem to matter much now as Frederic explained before, but it's still an interesting problem.
Have a nice day!
Suspicious bot activity https://freesound.org/people/hellosatan0/?
20k downloads a week
Another download bot account https://freesound.org/people/Leelei/?
405200 downloads for a 5days old account x')
Another one with less activity (39,751 downloads), but still a bot.
https://freesound.org/people/skyfortress/