This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I’m just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.

  • Lemvi@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    no, think about what that would imply. Anyone could practicaly delete any other profile by creating an instance and banning that profile on that instance. That would be insane.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Having to play whack-a-mole banning on a per-instance basis if the account’s home instance admin isn’t cooperative isn’t exactly ideal, either.

      Perhaps what we need is to implement some sort of happy medium, such as having instance bans be “votes” towards some threshold that, if met, would result in banning the account network-wide?

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      1 year ago

      I have my own instance where I’m the only user and only admin. I have only banned two users (porn spam bots), but my ban list has hundreds of users, and I have no idea how they got here. I can see who banned them in the modlog and why, but how did they get banned on my instance?

    • Lemvi@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      But if you mean whether these posts are also deleted for people viewing your instance through another, federated instance, then yes, that is the case.

      • Lemvi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        If you want to get rid of spam bots, ban them on your own instance and defederate any instance that doesn’t do the same.

          • bipmi@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Being able to ban people across instances would defeat the entire point of the fediverse. The best solution would either be to just defederate from instances that spawn lots of bots, or to contact those instances and work on the issue with them. There isn’t really any other better way that I can think of

      • exu@feditown.com
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        1 year ago

        Yes, but only from the original community moderators / instance admins the community is on. This happens so a mod removing content also removes that content on any other instance following this community.

        If you ban a user on your own instance, but originating somewhere else this will only make posts and comments by this user invisible for users on your instance.

  • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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    1 year ago

    As far as I understand it, the instance that hosts the user and the content is the only instance that can propagate deletions of the content/user. So if that user’s home instance bans them, then the ban propagates. Otherwise, the ban is only local.

    • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaOP
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      1 year ago

      So is the right process to report the post? (I’m assuming reports go to the home instance’s community moderator.)

      And if that’s the case, does that mean we need to avoid clicking the checkmark to “resolve” the report on our instance until the remote moderator has done something about the problem?

      • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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        1 year ago

        I’m actually not clear on how the reports work, but my assumption is that they go to both the instance you’re reporting from and to the instance that hosts the content. I would also assume that the resolve status is local to each instance so it shouldn’t matter when/if you click the resolve button.

        But these are all assumptions, I don’t actually know how the reports work.

        • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaOP
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          1 year ago

          Do you have some time to test it? You can post something to Ninja Tea Room and then report it. Let me know and I’ll confirm that the report exists on our site. Then you can resolve the report and I can confirm one way or the other whether the status changes locally here, and whether the reason propagates. We will take care not to ban you. :-)

            • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaOP
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              1 year ago

              The report just arrived in our moderation queue. Please click the resolved checkmark on your side.

              Next, please post a second post in the Tea Room and this time I will report it, get confirmation from you, and then I will resolve it.

              • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
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                1 year ago

                Ok, I have marked my report as resolved on my instance and took no action (so I have left the post up on my instance).

                I have just made a 2nd post. I have not reported it.

                • RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninjaOP
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                  1 year ago

                  Resolving the report on your side seems to have had no effect on our side. In Lemmy UI, there is a very subtle color difference in the checkmark before and after it is clicked, so I took a screenshot of the report.

                  Before:

                  After:

                  I guess there’s a chance that it may take time for the change in state to propagate to me, so I’ll watch it over the next 20 minutes or so to see if it changes.

                  I am now reporting the second test post.

  • breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As I understand it, the account is registered on a given instance, and then that account interacts with other instances via the instance theyre registered on.

    They cannot log into another instance with the same details (they need to create an account on each instance).

    IE, to interact with you on .ml i’m logged into .world. The instances are federated so I see your post on this .ml community on .world

    If I was banned from .world I can’t access the instance and thus any .ml because my interaction is via world instance. I can’t use the same account to log onto ml, I would need to make a new account there