Some ideas for anti-spam measures that might help:
block users who post flood -- e.g. if an account makes 10 posts a minute, it's a spammer
block accounts that end up massively in the negative shortly after they start posting -- e.g. an account at -50 within 15 minutes of making its first post is probably a spammer (exact thresholds may need some tuning). Note that this is different from blocking new accounts that go into the negative since people can register accounts in advance of an attack and wait until later to cause disruption.
block users who post repetitive comments/links excessively -- e.g. if the same link is in 10 comments/posts from the last hour or they've submitted the exact same comment a dozen times, the account is probably a spammer (again, thresholds may need tuning); that won't catch all the bots (one of them added a bunch of random words) but will catch some of them. More clever filtering could catch the other bots.
block new posters who are reported many times by established accounts in good standing -- at least until an admin can check what is going on
I'm not entirely sure any of that would be effective in controlling visibility of spam accounts from other instances. I'm quite sure that up/down voting does not always federate perfectly. Those steps would all be effective in handling malicious accounts on the same instance they're registered with, as long as their malicious posts and comments are also on that same instance; the effectiveness would certainly fall off sharply for content posted at other instances.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
We don't need to depend on federated downvotes to judge what does or does not belong on kbin. In fact, I think it's probably better if we don't. People are downvoting the bots here. I have yet to see an account with negative rep. on kbin that wasn't a spammer.
Regardless, rate-limiting incoming posts will limit the damage and annoyance to us.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
I'm not sure that would help with this particular issue -- and there's already a fair amount of bad relations between instances so I don't think a wider fediverse board is likely to succeed even if it could help somehow... I guess instance admins that do agree on general moderation principles could help co-admin each other's instances to cover better for when they're offline (maybe some of them already do?), but we shouldn't have to depend on remote admins being responsive to deal with an issue affecting our instance.
Hello, does anyone know if it’s possible to moderate a magazine hosted on kbin with a lemmy account? I’ve been taking care of a magazine hosted here for months and the owner is MIA as far as I can tell (I tried messaging them to no avail), but the adoption feature mentioned here doesn’t appear for me from the lemmy side. Given how lemmy and kbin are compatible-yet-different, I’d understand if the moderation features can’t cross over, but for now I just don’t know so here I am =) Thanks for reading!
Thank you for your answer! I suppose I’ll do that, then. So far the magazine has honestly not really needed moderation, but it’s always better to have someone ready before problems happen =')
In this specific case the community owner posted good guidelines before disappearing so we have that at least, but I’d appreciate being able to change the pinned message for example (current one is outdated), and the other community I adopted got a totally random troll post once so I now consider that these can pop absolutely anywhere at any time =')
It is! Thank you very much 🧡 (Limbus Company is a turned-based strategy game with a heavy emphasis on story, and the less gacha-esque gacha to ever exist x’) )
Thanks for the feedback, I've contributed sorting of the magazines and actually "the other four are under the hot tab" is not the case. They're not in any specific tab, they just sort by number of threads/comments/posts/subscriptions. I've done it this way to be backwards compatible with newest/hot/active tabs that were already there before introduction of sorting by clicking on table headings. Nonetheless, I agree that the Magazines page needs more polishing after recent changes and your suggestions are good.
of all these beautiful features, gotta say the CSS styling on the mags is my FAAAAVVEEE. i love doing it. i kinda go overboard and need to reel it in, but the ability to personalize your mag is so fun. though, people should have an option to toggle mag styles off, they can be distracting or the best part about the mag lol (ㅅ´ ˘ `)
Been having a problem recently (and intermittently) where when I upvote a comment it goes to a page that says Error and I have to go back to the previous thread, refresh it, and then the upvote works.
No, kbin.cafe is not run by the same person that runs kbin.social; here's a post by the owner of kbin.cafe and @ernest is the owner of kbin.social and the main developer of kbin. As you mentioned, kbin works similar to an email service, so different kbins (and lemmys and mastodons) can communicate with each other.
If you use it only for bookmarking threads, then kinda yeah.
But if you just give thumbs up to stuff without ever returning later, then it would probably be difficult to find your bookmarks from between.
My personal opinion?
I'd rather keep them apart, cos I feel they are a different function and useful apart as well.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Advanced Search -URL" but on Kbin you can put federated #links on the search bar to get (or create) the Kbin version. It works with microblogs, threads and comments.
In my view ideally upvotes and downvotes federate both ways, but I can also see why some admins might choose not to federate in downvotes.
I guess the real question comes down to what you do with the information.
I think currently the sort order is very heavily skewed towards boosts (which I actually quite like), but I do also sometimes wonder how it would look if the sort order was aligned with the reputation system (i.e. boost= two upvotes).
Having both sort options available might be nice, (noting that we'll not federate in any boosts from Lemmy).
If we did federate in downvotes the current sort order (which seems based on boosts less downvotes?) probably wouldn't make sense?
...I'm also be keen to see others thoughts on this!
Lemmy users don’t have boosts, so they would not be able to deliver “two upvotes” but I also think kbin shouldn’t be limited by what lemmy can or cannot do.
Having both sorting algorithms for both upvotes and boosts available as a sort option might be the most fair way forward.
A boost is effectively a retweet. The thing you boost gets re-shared from you to the people that follow you ... the stuff I boost with this account is gets added to my feed on my Mastodon account. You're basically saying "damn, I love this comment and want to make sure everyone else gets a chance to see it too!"
Boosts are originally Mastodon's version of Twitter's retweets. By boosting a post, you share it with your followers.
Behind the scenes, this is how they're implemented on kbin too right now. Though it seems incomplete, as there's not currently a way to view content boosted by your followed users without visiting their profiles manually.
kbin currently uses boosts to sort threads by top, rather than upvotes. Which might be what you were referring to there.
Writing this out now, I realize it might not actually be a difference worth mentioning while it doesn't add anything unique besides added complexity and Mastodon integration (which just goes back to microblogging being a thing on kbin which is already covered).
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a language to describe the visual design of websites.
An older version of Reddit (old.reddit.com) allowed subreddits to specify their own custom CSS code which would be used when users visited those subreddits. They could completely transform the design of the site using that feature. Or they could hack in features specific to their subreddit. Many subreddits both big and small made use of that feature and are still using it even today.
Spoilers for example were done using links and custom CSS long before Reddit added their official spoilers.
Kbin takes the same approach as old.reddit. Magazines can specify their own custom CSS code to change kbin's appearance while visiting the magazine. Though I have only seen one magazine make use of that so far, so it's not nearly as widespread as on Reddit yet.
new comments
On kbin, there's a setting in the sidebar (the gear icon) to mark new comments in threads you've seen before (since turning on the feature). I think it defaults to off.
When turned on and visiting a thread, new comments since your last visit are marked with a yellow bottom left corner. This is a very recent addition and seems to only be clear enough with the Tokyo Night theme currently. On other themes the colored corner is very hard to see for me.
kbinMeta
Hot
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