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Spam from unmoderated communities/magazines
(feddit.ch)
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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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.