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Banning spam accounts

Banning spam accounts on kbin.social is a cumbersome affair.

E.g., today @bayaz tried to ban several spam accounts. But that just did not quite work:

Instead of straight forward banning the accounts responsible for spam, those accs got unbanned.

How come?

If magazine owners ban a spam acc which prior went unreported, the ban button triggers an unban command.

To effectively ban accounts, they must be reported first. Approving the report will trigger a ban. I.e. magazine owners must report the account identified as spam to themselves to enforce a ban.

Therefore, pre-emptive banning of spam accounts does not work on kbin.social.

This is a serious problem which needs to be addressed asap.

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  • Could you point me to some of the magazines where you feel this is particularly rampant right now?

    • Lots of places that list ernest as the only moderator. Some I've seen are on communities such as: fediverse, internet, opensource, science, random (which also pulls content from various places, which had the added minus that spam from other instances will not have deletions federated). Even the ask communities are sometimes hit, or for instance in this community there's a spam thread for pills in Dubai right below this one in new (from 2 days ago).

      Specifically I'm talking about stuff you'll either see piled up in the new feed OR in the 'random threads'/posts section. My new feed isn't lotsa spam like it was earlier, but the sidebar currently is.

      Image link for non-Kbin. Also, BUFO TOAD VENOM

      • Science often has maybe 6 pharma ads every morning. Today it had so many I went looking for someplace to discuss it.

      • You don't like bufo toad venom? I like to start my mornings by sipping a little bufo toad venom while reading kbin. Buy bufo toad venom today.

        In all seriousness...I don't know if you saw my last thread about KES in this magazine, but I suggest giving it a try. I've extended the filter coverage based on your feedback, and those magazines should essentially be expunged of garbage for the time being.

        As for the sidebar, I believe the implementation is fundamentally flawed because it loads content that, AFAIK, doesn't respect your actual block settings. I suggest disabling the random threads element altogether in KES by navigating to General > Hide sidebar elements.

        • I don't know if you saw my last thread about KES in this magazine

          I did. I would still be commenting about it as I don't think extra stuff should be necessary to fix a problem like this. Filters should exist especially for new accounts (even the most cautious implementation could make a big difference), comparing names to banned accounts before account creation too (or shadowbanning so they don't just choose different names).

          because it loads content that, AFAIK, doesn't respect your actual block settings

          Oh yeah, funnily enough the one thread in my image that isn't spam was from a community I blocked. (at least I think it was, hard to tell with different instances)

          Also to add to my list above, I just noticed a lot of spam posted in the food community. Also checking from the top of the magazine list with default sorting: tech, TodayILearned, space, showerthoughts, programming (though some of the spam is related SEO-type garbage). Books has 1 piece of spam and 1 user (probably bot given the post with 503 - Service unavailable in a title) who just aggregates Amazon links+descriptions.

          • Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that a third-party prophylactic tool is a definitive solution to what is ultimately a separate problem, just trying to be pragmatic here and restore basic readability for end-users, whether the filtering is done at the source or after the fact.

            Let's be real here, we are talking about unmoderated magazines on an instance where the developer is AWOL and using a framework that is lacking many basic features. Even with moderators, manual moderation can be a big ask and is time-consuming for free volunteers, depending on the volume of posts or how rudimentary the moderation tools are.

            I actually don't read kbin magazines much, so I wasn't aware of the extent of the problem until I started opening those magazines more closely, and felt that something is better than nothing.

            On the magazines you mentioned, I do see a few anomalous patterns that I'll start filtering. For the most part, with filtering enabled, they were almost entirely free of garbage, save for a few patterns I may have missed on the first few passes. /programming and /food I need to take a deeper look at. The /food thing is good intel, because the use of Amazon referral links in the threads is something that can be generalized to other situations beyond books. Posting referral links is definitively block-worthy.

            I also noticed some stuff that by any other name would be considered a thinly-veiled ad, such as specific users only posting articles to web sites they own and operate. I'm not talking about bots as such, but actively promoting one's own content--even when such content is on-topic for the magazine. I declined to filter this stuff yet, because it received a lot of upvotes and seemed to be received favorably, maybe because the readers felt it was at least germane to the topic at hand? I think this is probably true for /food as well, because the line between "content" and "promotion" is unclear here, since what is a food blog if not a product generating click revenue? It seems like the tolerance threshold for that sort of thing is higher in a magazine like /food versus some other magazine. Anyway, I digress. I'm not treating such stuff as in scope, just filtering what is blatantly noise.

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