Legacy / superseded repository. No active development occurs here.
This repository is retained as a historical pointer for earlier DEV.to coordinated-behavior investigation work. The active successor is devto-botnet-hunter, which is currently maintained as a private repository; public visitors should not expect the successor to be accessible without repository permission.
The retained long-form draft devto_bot_audit_FINAL.md reflects an earlier investigation/publication state and should not be treated as the current analytical standard.
Two counts in that artifact are easy to conflate:
- 1,409 — the full follower cohort audited at the documented snapshot;
- 897 — the high-confidence coordinated-pattern subset produced by the documented score threshold after false-positive review.
The draft's 899 headline is inconsistent with its own final table and is retained only as historical draft text. More importantly, later sections of that draft contain stronger marketplace/operator-mechanism interpretations than the available public evidence can independently establish. Its own limitations section correctly notes that IP/device linkage, purchase records, session data, payment records, and internal moderation telemetry were unavailable.
For current work, preserve the distinction between observed graph structure, coordinated-pattern classification, operational inference, and attribution.
- maintenance: superseded
- new features: none planned here
- installation: not recommended for new work
- authoritative active implementation: private successor repository
- historical value: repository lineage and references from older material
Deleting a superseded repository can break old links and erase useful project lineage. Keeping this tombstone makes the status and interpretation boundary explicit without presenting stale code or historical prose as a supported current tool.
If this repository is referenced from an older article or discussion, treat that reference as historical unless the material explicitly names a version, commit, dataset snapshot, and evidence boundary from this repository.
This is not a recommended starting project and should not be used to judge the current state of the active investigation tooling. Current public security/OSINT work is surfaced from the main GnomeMan4201 profile.
devto-bot-audit // legacy project lineage // GnomeMan4201
