Things You Can Expect from Wattpad

Entry 2: Bots and Follow Phases

So I talked about bots once in one of my other books and decided to expand on it here since it was only talked about briefly.

Alright, so I mentioned bot comments and messages. About the comments, I don't think I've received any bot comments so I can't say anything about that, but I have seen some and a bot comment will look something like this:

"My name is blah blah blah. My spouse passed away and oh insert sad story here and then a link at the end of the long comment."

And maybe some more stuff like that. I know I've seen a few that have to do with vampires (such as opening how the commentor always wanted to be a vampire) and these comments tend to be written more than once, maybe even twice on the same chapter. These also tend to be on the more popular stories, so you can probably find these kinds of comments on stories with over 100K reads.

Just about any website has bots. Wattpad certainly seems to have some, FF.net has them, and even YouTube has bots.

As for bot messages....it's almost as if something is off about it.

If you ever get a message from someone who claims to be from Xnovel, Rnovel, or Webnovel, that's a bot. Don't reply to it. 

Wait. I mean W E B N O V E L.

You also might receive a lot of messages from them. Sometimes I would receive so many messages from them that I sometimes got messages from real people, but I would mute them because I thought the real people were bots.

...Uh...sorry...thought you weren't real.

Bot messages seem off somehow like I already mentioned. It's almost as if they're....too happy? Bots will also claim to read a story of yours and love it, but if you check your story and find that the reads hadn't changed, that's also a sign the person is a bot.

This is a message I received from a bot a few months ago:

"Wow! Fantastic writing. I was completely amazed! >.< Love your story (story name), the plot and characters are just fascinating. Absolutely desire to read more! Do you mind if I ask something?"

Before you ask, I didn't include the story name because I didn't feel like it.

I checked the reads of the story and nothing had changed. It didn't help that I was suspicious of the person anyway because the bot seemed overly happy and ingenuine somehow.

Bots will also say these sorts of things about your more popular stories most of the time. If you have a story with 15K reads and another one with 10K, the bot would most likely say something about those stories.

I've also gotten some weird messages about people who wanna be my manager or something like that. I haven't gotten a lot of messages like that, but it'll say something about how the person thinks my stories are cool and then it'll say how they want to be my manager and something about a link in their profile, but there'd be no link. It went something like that.

If you ever get a message or comment like this, while I know you might be very curious to figure out what the link leads to, it's not a good idea. Just leave it alone.

Speaking of bots...now it's time for something else. Follow phases.

So let's say you have 100 followers. You go to sleep one night and wake up with 130 followers and counting the next morning.

This has happened to me quite a few times and even happened this April and Febuary. The Febuary phase passed pretty quickly and I managed to shoot up from 700 something followers to 887 followers, but then I quickly lost those and I think I was back down to around 723 followers after a few days.