Great, but I think this last several-day-downtime did a number on activity, seems abruptly more like a ghost town now. Unless those are just federation issues or people defederated us due to all the spam.
Most of the magazines being spammed in right now only have a single moderator, and it's Ernest. He needs to appoint additional moderators for magazines that he is the only moderator of.
Agree, but it's not a question of him appointing moderators. It's a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn't been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn't enough interest in the userbase at the moment.
However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don't appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.
I went ahead and requested mod for a couple of those mags. I wouldn't be able to dedicate too much time to it, but I could at least take on a janitorial role and help clean up the spam that keeps flooding in.
What all is involved on moderating? I haven't gotten involved in any of that, I come from a bulletin board back ground, not reddit, but I am sure I am not the only person without a relevant background who is willing to be helpful in some capacity. It will just all be new. But it seems like having a warm body to delete posts could help a lot!
Magazine moderators have the ability to delete posts in their community (also pin/unpin them) and ban users from their community. I don't think it would take a huge amount of time as a rule - it's just a matter of checking in regularly (I suppose ideally several times a day) to see if there are any moderator actions that need to be taken.
Beyond that, moderators typically play a role in curating content and setting/monitoring community guidelines. But we've been talking about people being appointed solely to carry out the more technical/administrative functions in certain magazines to prevent the recent flood of spam. Ie, people have said they'd be happy to ban spam accounts without necessarily taking on the curation of the magazine in question.
I requested to be added as a moderator to m/opensource, which is one of the worst offenders right now. Hopefully Ernest will accept some of the requests that people are making.
I think it's actually a good thing that there aren't a ton of moderator applications. It means the userbase aren't the same basement dwelling keyboard tyrants that Reddit had. Still, right now we could use more mods either way.
Ernest hasn't posted since last week, so hopefully he's okay. He's alluded to having a fever and having to figure out kbin's finances (and a bit before that, mentioned that he had to take on another job to cover the bills), so I'm guessing life has gotten in the way of kbin. It's worth bearing in mind that all the threadiverse projects are basically someone's hobby at the moment.
He's not really the moderator for those magazines. Those are communities that exist on Lemmy instances. For some reason, the actual community owner/mod list doesn't get synced over to Kbin from Lemmy communities. His username shows up as the "owner" for those, presumably as a failsafe for a null entry in the community owner metadata.
EDIT: Actually, these accounts are just spamming the local Kbin magazines, in which case yes that is something that should be moderated from the Kbin side.
Have noticed that, too. Most haven't been consistent or repeatable enough to report, but these seemed like they were. Hopefully, Ernest has time to take a look at them soon enough.
By default, it's 11MB if I remember correctly. However, during the recent issues with the instance, we could modify this value at the server level. Once Piotr is back, I'll verify and restore the default values.
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