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Spam from unmoderated communities/magazines
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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As someone on kbin.social, I'm not seeing it. I saw a comment in a similar thread saying that moderation done on Kbin doesn't federate to Lemmy instances, and I think that's the culprit here. @ernest (the Kbin dev) is working towards a full release, and I hope that it might fix this issue—or at the very least, that it's dealt with shortly after.
EDIT: Yeah, I looked at @science from lemmy.ml, and my God is it awful. This really needs to get fixed ASAP.
This week, I've been dealing with cleaning up instances from spam. Several hundred accounts were removed, along with several thousand posts - these were massive operations. It's possible that due to the volume of requests, other federated instances hit rate limits. I see that some of them are still in the queue with a "fail" status. I will gradually resend them after some time. Along with the update of kbin.social and the first release of kbin, new modeartion options will be available, including spam blocking (such as global blocking domains), a new reporting panel for moderators, and improved federation between instances. I will also address abandoned instances and ensure that each one has at least a few active moderators. I know how urgent this issue is, and it's my top priority. I just need a bit more time as Piotr and I are preparing for the update.
It looks like all the spam I've seen are from newly registered accounts. Perhaps this is something you've already considered, but would shutting off registration on kbin.social and pointing people to other instances until things are more manageable help?
lemmy.world has removed a lot of kbin.social content: https://lemmy.world/post/5289864
Can you also add moderators to those magazines? I volunteered for the science mag, but have not gotten a reply. Active mods will help with your workload too.
You're not taking action. This spammer is still posting, even though I reported him nearly an entire day ago.
For all the time you have to type excuses, you could be smashing the ban button, but you don't. This does not look like a "top priority" from this end. Stop making excuses and just ban the spam accounts. If you have communities without moderation, then close them. You're managing this very poorly.
Edit: Unbelievable! This spammer created yet another account. You're not vetting applications at all, are you? This is totally on you. Fix it.
I understand this is a frustrating experience dealing with so much crud in your feed. Admins and mods for many instances of Lemmy and Kbin are trying to work with the tools available to stem this. Attack the problem, not the person. Bee nice.
Please don't lash out at those trying to help you and the community. We certainly do appreciate your reports as well, hopefully we'll find a solution that won't require so much of your report efforts.
Of course, I'm taking action, and on kbin.social, those posts have been removed, which you can verify. However, for some reason, it doesn't always federate with Lemmy. It used to work before, but practically after every Lemmy update, there's something to fix in the code, or it could be related to API limits because some requests receive a "fail" status in the queues. The same applies to spam from Lemmy instances - I had to manually clean up hundreds of posts from other instances because they didn't always send AP requests, which I verified in the logs.
Do you seriously believe that it's a matter of individual accounts, and banning a user solves the problem?
Am I taking crazy pills? Ban the user, or they'll keep posting spam. Vet your applications like a valid instance instead of letting any spambot create an account.
You are not taking action if all you're doing is removing posts. You are handling this in an entirely inadequate and incompetent way, and you've made kbin a blight on the fediverse. Get your shit together.
It's certainly better than allowing these accounts to continue to post harmful spam. Then when people sign up, there should be some red flags in their application that you can watch for. It's not like these spammers are highly intelligent. They're pretty blatantly spam accounts, especially when they have literally just a number's difference in their username.
By the end of September, kbin.social will receive an update that will address some of the issues. For now, I'm banning spam accounts, and registration is disabled. Additionally, external links are marked as "nofollow." I just want to emphasize that this is not solely a kbin issue - I had to manually remove spam posts from Lemmy instances as well because moderation didn't federate, which doesn't happen with, for example, Mastodon.
For now, the admin of your instance can choose to defederate or remove communities, as the admin of lemmy.world did. Once I've dealt with the update, I will reach out to other admins and discuss the possibility of restoring valuable posts.
The problem is that at this scale and with this infrastructure, hotfixes are no longer as straightforward as they used to be - when I could solve these kinds of issues in a matter of hours.
Yeah, I think that might explain it.