Right now, @discobot is programmed to like any post where he is mentioned and the word “thanks” is included. Some members have figured out that @discobot never stops liking posts with thanks and have used it to artificially massively inflate the number of likes they received because they can just generate new likes on demand.
My suggestion is that in the future there be an ability to cap the number of times @discobot likes things or disable the “thanks” feature altogether.
It’s a bunch of students goofing off, so it isn’t too harmful and certainly isn’t malicious, and they like using discobot by asking it stupid questions and then calling “fortune” to have it answer those questions in frequently hilarious ways. Thus I don’t think either of your solutions will quite work, but I’ll think about maybe making a rule against it.
It still doesn’t change that maybe fixing it so @discobot can only like, say, 1 post per person would be an easy fix.
You see? This is one of the reasons that it’s good that I"m no longer teaching. (Actually, if I were still teaching, I’d agree, but it’s a good story…)
I’m far from expert at how good old discobot works, but I’m not sure how easy would be. Maybe no liking public posts would be easy, though.
I see no value in allowing this easter egg at all on public topics, seems crazy. I think we should just pull the easter egg. I don’t think it adds any value.