Are you guys browsing by new? Do you moderate active communities? I'm just curious to understand why we seem to have such different experiences since I only encounter spam once or twice per week, but I definitely spend way too many hours scrolling.
I spend more time blocking spammers than anything else. I’m sure it will improve once this issue gets more attention, but for now I think I’ll take a break from this site.
I agree that this may be the only real solution for the time being. I have personally been trying to submit good content to my favorite magazines to combat some of the spam, but there is a real influx of it and it's making it difficult to use the site.
This might be a good idea, at least until Ernest gets back. To my knowledge, he's the only instance admin, so as long as he's inactive, the spammers won't get dealt with (especially on magazines he moderates, like /m/tech).
Ideally, there could be another admin or two to deal with this stuff when he's not available, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Metafilter had a charge of a dollar or two to sign up, and no recurring payments. Seems like a good way to prevent spammers.
Not too much of a hurdle to cross, especially if payments are thru Amazon or some other existing service ppl have trust in. Any funds go to server costs.
Facebook doing edu (initially only one school) only was to target a specific audience. Google followed the exclusivity model to gain hype and encourage word of mouth.
Neither did it for security reasons and both switched to open sign-ups once they reached a certain level of users.
Why don't automated spam systems use them then? Its easy for an individual but its not super automately like google. At least at my alma matter its not.
I think you're thinking 4 year college, not 2 years. It takes a lot of effort and money to apply to a 4 year school. It takes like 5 minutes to apply at your local community college online and get a .edu email address, and it's free.
Using .edu as some sort of validation is a terrible idea because it's something anyone can get with just a few minutes of work.
yeah thats for an an individual though. A robotic spam account that needs to make a thousand accounts automatically is not going to make one so easily. spam from individuals is much easier to deal with than machine spam.
It is stupid easy to get a free .edu account. It will not hamper spammers in the slightest. Even if they don’t want to make a few .edu accounts a day to do their spamming, they can just buy .edu accounts in bulk for about 10 cents per. No one is making thousands of kbin accounts to spam from, they make a handful a day, and use them till they get banned. Then they make a few more.
.edu accounts are a terrible way to try and prevent spam on kbin. There is literally an industry around generating fake .edu accounts. You can buy them in bulk. Some colleges receive 10’s of thousands of fake applications a month trying to get free .edu emails.
Yeah I had no idea they could be bought it bulk. I thought you had to be registered. Granted there are all the for profit colleges now. Would not be surprised if they straight sold them directly.
I spend a lot of time downvoting and reporting and I've volunteered to co-mod the worst offending subs that I'm subnscribed to. It's not clear that any of this has any effect.
At this point, it feels like a bit of a lost cause.
I'm honestly not sure. I haven't been seeing too much of these problem accounts myself. I moderate m/politics and it hasn't been a problem for us yet. I would suggest making a note of which magazines you are seeing this behavior on, and if it's something that is up your alley, reach out to Ernest to ask for moderation privileges. He's very happy to give them to others who are dedicated.
I’ve volunteered for several over the last month. Never heard a thing. -in particular science, fediverse, tech where large amounts of spam seem to occur and which seem abandoned
I'm sure you're aware there has been an issue with people/bots spamming CP on some lemmy instances, I'm not sure if I happened to see them before removal, or if removal still isn't federating properly (since I know the admins/mods have been trying to implement additional solutions), either way, these posts were still showing up on all/new last night/early this morning (GMT), so it might just be worth double checking on your end if there is any way to stop this.
A bit of a miscelaneous request, but I would kind of like a single button "x-post" for articles so that I can quickly cross post to related communities. If it's a thread (like this one, and not a link), it would link directly to the thread and and also show the comments of the thread (basically becomes a pointer to an article)
Posting the same link to 3 magazines is enough IMO. Your /kbin account can be followed via Mastodon and similar services, and Mastodon interprets crossposting as completely different posts.
They both federate and they both look the same I think.
However, Mastodon search works by tags iirc. And kbin/lemmy users tend to not use tags. So discoverability is low.
The Microblog section is supposed to add the magazine's tags to your posts there, though I don't know if it currently does. I remember reading issues about it not being the case, but those were rather old, so not sure about the current status.
Has anyone actually been accepted as a moderator? I requested to help moderate /science a while ago - just because it was full of spam - and I've heard nothing - not even a rejection. Still happy to kill spam.
Since @ernest is the owner for that magazine, I think moderator requests have to go through him. Unfortunately, he was dealing with a slight fever awhile ago, and has been dealing with financial planning and project formalities awhile back as well. Hopefully things haven't gotten worse. For what it's worth, I think it's great you're eager to contribute. There have definitely been some spam issues recently. I hope a solution can be found soon. Maybe even something like posts which have a <10% upvote-to-downvote ratio over a day/week can be temporarily quarantined until an admin approves of it. Anyways, best of luck with modship.
yeah morgunkorn explained it and I was just having some mental blindness or something. im smacking my head at how its location is right where you would think it would be. don't know how I missed it.
yup one of those mental blindness things I think. Even after you said I could not find it and then did a control f and low and behold its like right there. don't know how I did not see it. even has a mail icon.
Do note that you can't currently message users on other instances from kbin. The button will still be there, but it will bring you back to the homepage. I believe Ernest said something about it being "unimplemented," so I'm assuming cross-instance messaging will happen someday, but is probably not a high priority at the moment.
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