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.)
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).
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.