It’s spam where a YSK post would do There already is one, the reason I made the bot is that people don’t read it: https://lemmy.world/post/77145

I just read the post. It's a good one! The post does a much better job of explaining the problem than the bot does. I've since blocked it, so I can't go back and look at the message, but I don't remember it containing a link to get more information. Maybe you should link to the YSK post?

The bot is vague. It says that some users have problems with this format. That’s false, it says explicitly, that users on different instances have problems.

Again, the bot doesn't explain what the problem is, or why it might be better to use the different format. It just says that some users have problems on different instances. You've left the user to guess what those problems are. I wasn't experiencing any problems with the URL form I was using, so of course I concluded that the bot was wrong.

It is actively doing harm to kbin users Not sure about that and it might be a valid criticism. Thought it doesn’t fix Kbin links, only Lemmy links, so if you post a Lemmy link, I think it’s ok if the bot fixes it for users of Lemmy.

I went back and tested the !link format on kbin, and it does in fact work. I previously edited my comment to reflect this. Note that I did not test this on a community to which kbin is not already linked, or on a community that has not been searched for on the user's Lemmy instance. However, you may be interested in Cold Hotman's feedback that this doesn't work for Mastodon users.

Edit: It appears that using the !format returns a 404 if nobody on your instance has searched for the community yet. That seems less desirable than the alternatives for people on small instances like mine.