Hi everyone,
I think it has become clear that many bot accounts are swarming the communities. Sometimes we can’t be sure whether a specific account is a bot, but there are some clues. I will not post the clues here since they could be used by bot creators to bypass the rules.
Lemmy (the software) currently doesn’t have tools to automate moderation, so everything has to be moderated manually.
That said, I will be adding a few anti-bot rules to the /c/comicstrips community:
- A limit of two posts per person per day.
- Bots are not allowed. There will be heavy moderation of suspected bot accounts. If an account is identified as a bot, its posts will be deleted and it will receive a permanent ban.
- Banned users will have their posts removed.
And thank you to everyone in the community who reports possible spammers and bots. It helps a lot.
Here is the previous post that I fixed before, which contains a few discussions about this subject: https://lemmy.world/post/42127013
Do you have any comments or suggestions? I’m listening.
(This is not the future that Asimov expected.)
- A limit of two posts per person per day.
This should probably be linked to the account age and combined with a time limit between posts of 30 minutes or an hour, as the bots I have seen usually post in quick succession.
It’s fairly easy for a bot to post at random times. However it’s possible to create a bot to check for bot behavior.
I made a few tests with bot moderation and quickly reached Lemmy.world instance limits (because the bot needs to read the posts consecutively and also get the user’s public data).
When the account reaches the limit, it can’t log in for a period. I don’t want my account to be banned, so I will not continue trying to create moderation bots for Lemmy instances.
feel free to get in touch with us if you have issues with api limits. we can’t change them for individual users but we may be able to give you advice on more efficient usage.
your bot shouldn’t be logging in every time it checks what is going on; it’s best to persist the JWT you get from logging in and keep using it. the signup/login rate limit (which for whatever reason has the same counter) is relatively low to limit abuse, but the other endpoints should be more relaxed. you’d also have to hit pretty high request counts for us to even look at it. i recommend using a separate bot account (see bot rules).
Hi @MrKaplan. I will continue my efforts to improve my moderation bot by following all your recommendations, such as implementing persistent sessions and creating a different account for the bot, also adhering to the bot rules of the instance. Additionally, I will slow down consecutive calls to the API. Let’s see how it goes. Thank you.
What are the limits? I don’t think it needs to run constantly. Something that checks every few minutes would be a strong enough deterrent imo.
The bigger problem is that the user can just make his account ahead of time.
This. If someone’s been here tor years and been a contributer I don’t think the 2-post limit should apply.
Yeah, ickplant and lady_butterfly or something like that are a couple of my favorites who post quite a bit and I’m pretty sure they’re not bots (?)
Lol the bots down voting all the comments is hilarious
Suck it bot-authors
It’s all me 😭. The newest one got a belly laugh out of me though, not gonna lie. I crossed out the only one that isn’t a day old account.
Here’s what I think is going on, since calling him out is probably the best (copy pasted from an other comment):
He is always posting divisive content. He probably downvotes certain comments and tries to instigate arguments to make Lemmy feel hostile. It’s to turn people off and get them to leave imo.
How do you see who voted on your comment?
A Lemmy user built lemvotes.org . Consider donating if you find yourself using it, they have a github! It’s useful for finding bots.
Admins and moderators can also see, although I think moderators can only see for their community. Some instances block lemvotes, mainly .ml .
Neat, the imposter grimy downvoted me three times, yay! Lol
Oh I misunderstood this comment initially and thought you were admitting to making alt accounts to downvote but someone actually created a bunch of alts with your name to downvote you and others? Psychotic behaviour lol
I wonder what his beef with grimy is, that’s insane 😂
Thank you! I’m so tired of seeing the same fucking dude post from a million alt accounts.
Lemmy is popular enough to have bots now? Crazy.
I don’t get the appeal. Preparing to redirect to paid content? Just to feel cool?
it just takes one mentally ill person to make it their hobby to harass people on the internet
Antiyanks comes to mind.
Yeah I don’t get the appeal of bots at all. I also like that Lemmy isn’t that busy or popular personally.
He is always posting divisive content. He probably downvotes certain comments and tries to instigate arguments to make Lemmy feel hostile. It’s to turn people off and get them to leave imo.
I’ve considered using a script to post more often, so that the quieter communities don’t seem like a wasteland. More posts= more engagement = more human posts
I do love that I’m getting voted down for trying to make it busier to try and get more real people, because network effect is a thing. I get it, we want more actual human engagement, but some of these communities, 2 years in, have single-digit active members, on subs with 70k on That R Site.
Someone made 20 new accounts yesterday to downvote in the thread. You technically received 1 downvote.
Is there a way to change the title or pin an automated comment to flag the post as a bot instead of deleting it? I think it’s better to sensetize the community on the subjects the bot accounts target so it’s easier to spot it elsewhere. I also think deleting posts also deletes interesting comment chains midway at times. I’ve had it happen and it’s a bit frustrating.
I guess it wouldn’t stop it from getting on the all feed though. I wish there was a way to lock votes or reset them.
Edit: one of the bots down voted me lol, he actually created extra accounts with my name to downvote. I guess it’s his idea of taunting.
Edit: The guy is actually losing it lol. Everyone in this thread, including recent comment history for me and cannedtuna, is being downvoted by bots with my name.
only the person creating a post can mark their own account as bot or change the title
Is there a reason mods can’t edit the title of a post? I’ve found myself wanting this behavior when I’m moderating.
all content is generally owned by its creator and only the creator can change it. for lemmy 1.0 this will be changing for marking as nsfw and managing tags, so it seems that this is somewhat being relaxed.
This was widely seen as a good move
Removed by mod
Just keep an account, it’s that easy. Your behavior comes off as manipulative and having an agenda.
at this point they’re long past the point where they’d be tolerated here to keep a single account. they’re constantly impersonating and harassing other people, they need the new accounts to be able to evade bans.
Finally
Removed by mod
you could also require alt-text for every post (or at least for new accounts) because it would increase the effort to post. but that could probably discourage some users from posting and is kinda hard to check automatically.
A pretty straightforward thing for a bot to do, I would think.
Yes, agreed. But the spam bot could just add random alt text or post descriptions. Checking if the text makes sense involves using an LLM with vision capability ($).
creating or checking alt-text?
Both. I don’t see any “mechanical” action like this as likely to be useful. Probably easier for a posting bot to remember to do than a human.
Edit: It’s funny when comments like this get downvoted. The downvoting isn’t going to change how easy it is for bots to add alt text when posting. Is ignoring their capabilities going to help combat them?
Is there only one mod? If needed, I can help! Especially if we create a “credit the artist” rule. :3
A limit of two posts per person per day.
I was glad to hear about this new rule, but we still have content-dumpers making many posts in a short period of time. Bot or not I still don’t like seeing many similar posts on my feed all from the same person at the same time.
You’re my hero. Hope automation (sensibly implemented) reaches mods soon!
Would it be possible to slowly build a whitelist for users that you confirm are legitimate?
For context, I subscribe to web comics through RSS feeds, and sometimes I’ll sit down to look through the feed and then schedule out posts for the few good ones. I can totally keep it to the 2 posts per day limit, but I’m worried that I might forget one day in the future. It’s hard to keep track of community specific posting rules 😅
I totally understand if the extra posts get removed, this is more about not getting banned by an automated system.
I have been identified as a bot account because of my use of a VPN. I am not a bot so the system is not working perfectly. Thanks
