This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Whenever you see something like this, please just report the post as spam, block the user and petition your community moderators to recruit more mods, especially in other time zones.
Even better, volunteer as mod yourself.
Also please tell your admins to use an application rather than just the captcha - the captchas are easily broken.
We also need shareable blacklists if they federate as well then that would be ideal. Surly someone can write a community thats a bot that gives democracy to blocklists.
Not necessarily a bad idea, but most the spam I've seen is from new accounts on larger instances, so I'm not sure it'll help with this.
Seems like a user pattern that should be fairly detectable. Might not be a bad idea to scrape logs to look for spammy/copypaste comments, particularly on very new accounts, and either flag them for manual review or just ban them outright.
yeah usually less than an hour to a few hours old. occasionally they make it to days.
I wish there was a seperate block as spam that would auto report. Some things I block due to lack of interest but others spam and our current report takes more clicks than I like. Then I would also like to be able to subscribe to peoples spam block list. If I like the cut of someones hib I might just subscribe to block any spam they block.
Exactly could have different lists made by different communities democraricly.
yeah I want as much power pushed down to the individual as possible. I was even thinking you just sorta have recommended mods. like by default you are subscribed to their block lists for the community but if you subscribe you have an option to see unmoderated or such.
Somewhat already exists, called Fediseer
There are a few other instances that subscribe to lemmy.world's censures list on there
Some instances may not want to use democracy to decide on what to block. But some web of trust would be nice perhaps. Like I trust an instance and if that instance blocks another instance, maybe I'd block it too.
I thinking more on a per user basis content tagging should defiantly have blacklists as well. But tags arent a thing yet?
I don't think they are. The closest thing is hashtags but tags aren't really a thing in ActivityPub as far as I'm aware. This kind of system will also always depend on people correctly tagging their stuff of course.
Never have seen one so I'm guessing it's not all that common
It is relatively common in that it happens regularly, but people thankfully downvote it so it rarely lands in peoples' feeds.
I usually report them as spam.
Not all of us get downvotes, I see them pretty much daily...
sort by new
Looks like they might be removed (except one). Sorting by new and looking for downvoted posts I just see the one ad and an article about string theory + AI (double whammy).
Haven't seen any ads. Maybe your Lemmy mobile app is inserting ads?
It makes me wonder if this place is getting bigger and more relevant, if it's attracting interest from spammers.
Bots and lack of mods on different timezones most likely.
Would probably make sense to have an account age requirement and comment requirement before posting somehow.
account age requirement and comment requirement before posting
This can also be very unwelcoming to new users though. Reddit often feels like a closed place because so many subs have karma requirements. I'd prefer we didn't go there.
We should rather stop allowing sign ups without an application. The captchas are not good enough.
We should rather stop allowing sign ups without an application. The captchas are not good enough.
That's near impossible to enforce, due to the federated nature. Server admins could whitelist which instances they trust, but I don't think that'll do much good from a community point of view.
Perhaps a sticky to find better moderator/timezone coverage could help. (And for that matter, I wouldn't mind stricter moderation on post relevance - not all news about tech companies or events that just happen to take place online is tech news, imho)
near impossible to enforce, due to the federated nature. Server admins could whitelist
What if you could automatically federate with any instance requiring an application, but anything else you would need to whitelist? Maybe that could work.
I'm no federation expert, but I think if you could convince your own instance admin, or the one hosting this community (lemmy.world), to do so, you'd be good. But that would potentially affect a lot more users than just the ones in this community, so they might take some effort.
Also, I'm not aware of any tools that could automate this for you.
I know there isn't anything like this now, I'm basically just theorycrafting how it should/could function :)
If you think that's unwelcoming, applications are even more so. Most people don't want to fill out an essay just to be allowed to participate.
If I had to fill out an application, I wouldn't be here, and I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't be either.
That's not to say that better methods shouldn't be implemented though.
An application doesn't have to be an essay. Feddit.dk has an application that literally just requires a sentence or two. It's really not a big barrier to entry.
For that matter - I'm okay with filtering out people who think it's too much effort. Quality over quantity.
Exactly my thoughts as well :)
I agree here. Filling out an application would have easily kept me out. Many may see that as a good thing though :)
Then you don't get any new people at all. (Or very few)
This can also be very unwelcoming to new users though.
For like the first week of posting...
Then it's never an issue again.
But it's hard for trolls and bots to build that up for every account.
Theres been more than a few that just keep making new accounts on small instances the second they're banned
It is an issue if you change instance, which you may do more often than creating new accounts on traditional social media. And again, I just find it kind of unwelcoming.
Maybe automatically creating a report to just check the post for spam when a new user posts would be nice? Then a mod can check it out but it's not removed automatically or blocked.
I think this would be great to limit this. I really don't understand people wanting to comment right away. I just lurked for like a month to get a feel before I decided to participate.
I don't know. Only reason I create an account is to comment and post. Why otherwise have one?
to subscribe and get a curated list of what you want to look at. I can't imagine lurking without subscriptions to what im interested in.
I guess a timezone difference too since I never see any ads.
Saw that too, it's annoying. In a weird way, spam kinda legitimizes this platform as a Reddit alternative.
No idea, but I notice it too
Just blocked and reported an account and the single shill-post it produced. Not sure what to do about it, maybe we need more mods
What do you mean? When I lurk here, I ignore the sites that Idk. I rely on sites that I know are legit like Verge, Techcrunch, Engadget, Cnbc, Bloomberg, Ars Technica and Electrek. The sites that Idk may be legit too but I don't wanna spend much time researching the legitimacy.
There's room for innovation. If enough people downvote, or flag a post, and those people have enough interaction with the community, let's say posting credit, or comments, or account age etc etc etc then a bot could auto remove posts. Kind of like craigslist does, or at least put those posts into a quarantine queue until a human can release it
There's many problems with automatic removals though. It can be abused for instance.
