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Every person is unique, just like that we can safely say that every bot is unique as well, and even - not all bots are bots at all.

As of the moment - getting a bot vote on your posted contribution for Utopian.io will garner penalties - even if it is intentional or not. Even if your hands are clean, you get penalized. It's a pretty unfair rule for trying to be fair.

Every bot is unique, so why should we not classify them into different lists? Different bots has different functions. Let's not call them bots anymore, shall we? Let's call them Upvoters.

We can divide Upvoters into a few categories and make the corresponding penalties for those categories that are fairer.

• Intentional Upvoters
• Automatic Upvoters
• Rewarding Upvoters
• Unverified Upvoters

I have jotted down those 4 categories, we can always improve on its meaning and on the words/terms used. Here's a more detailed information about those categories:

1. Intentional Upvoters
   These are Upvoters you intentionally get upvotes from that has a big vote weight or number of trailing upvoters behind it. Examples are vote buying/bidding services and Curation Trails. The rewards you get and the number of upvotes you get from these Upvoters can greatly influence the rewards you may get when the Utopian Bot decides to weigh your post's value and gives out its upvote with a certain percentage.

2. Automatic Upvoters
   These are people that have you on automatic upvote, these are mostly real people that give you support as an author or maybe as a friend, making their upvote a real one because they value you as a user.

3. Rewarding Upvoters
   These can either be a person or an organization that provides sponsorship in leverage to proof of work. This means that the upvotes you are getting from these Upvoters are something you deserve because you have worked for it.

4. Unverified Upvoters
   These are accounts that upvote your post that has no identity, no high rewards or high number of upvotes being provided to your post. (For example: 0.01$ or 1 upvote)

What should be the corresponding penalty for getting upvotes from those categorized Upvoters?

1. Intentional Upvoters = Post needs to be banned from getting an upvote from the Utopian bot because the contributor knows that garnering more rewards in $ and more upvotes on their post will get them more rewards from the Utopian Bot, thus this may be considered as gaming the system.

2. Automatic Upvoters = Post should get minimum penalty for each of these verified Automatic Upvoters, e.g 0.1%-0.5% pero upvote only.

3. Rewarding Upvoters = These things should not get penalized at all since these upvotes were garnered as proof of work and the contributor has worked his way to deserve these upvotes.

4. Unverified Upvoters = We should disregard these Upvoters' upvotes from a contribution since we cannot verify it at all.

Further work is needed in categorizing the current list of 'bots' that we have in the Utopian API. Further checking is needed as well to see if we can remove a current 'bot' from the list due to valid reasons.

These things need professional work and not suggestions based on a whim and half-baked research.

What do you think of my Suggestion?