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.

bluGill 6 points 2 years ago

kbin needs to do a lot here. I'm not sure what is the state of the art now, but kbin isn't following the basics.

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jayrhacker 5 points 2 years ago

It would be nice if the report feature had a way to indicate if the problem is spam, content or whatever other issues people might have. You could have a threshold for spam reports to put the account in review and prevent of hide it's posts.

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testing 2 points 2 years ago

@jayrhacker
Would you elaborate on this?

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bluGill 5 points 2 years ago

I have to type 4 letters for every spam I see. I'd prefer to check a box (on my phone where typing is annoying this is even more useful) I do this dozens of times per day - it gets annoying fast.

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jayrhacker 3 points 2 years ago

A short pull-down list would work well: Spam, Harassment, Site ToS Violation, Thread/Group Rules Violation, etc.

This way you can automate rules like: if an article get's N spam or harassment reports it's put into the review queue and hidden until a Moderator can review it.

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Kierunkowy74 2 points 2 years ago

You can write a reason when you report a post. Are you actually seeing that as a moderator?

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insomniac_lemon 2 points 2 years ago

Most forums have dedicated categories for common stuff like this. Written reports are fine if an explanation is needed, not for the newly created samename37 spambot account illicitly selling drugs (or something that is probably phishing, like the delta airlines refund ticket type stuff) without really doing much to hide it.

It's the same communities and overwhelming at times to the point it doesn't even feel productive or even needed to report it. This is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

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shazbot 2 points 2 years ago

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

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insomniac_lemon 2 points 2 years ago

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

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testing 1 point 2 years ago

@Kierunkowy74
Yes, moderators can access the reports tab within the magazine panel. Every report must include some reason, hence moderators see them. Regarding bans: without giving a proper reason, no ban can come into effect.

You can also check the modlogs on kbin and lemmy instances for bans (does not apply to mbin).
@bayaz @jayrhacker

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livus 4 points 2 years ago

Wait what? That's so annoying.

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bayaz 2 points 2 years ago

FYI, I tried the process you mentioned, I'm not sure it's as simple as your post implies (if that process could be called "simple" anyway). I've tried a few different orders of "report, delete, ban", and clicked the "ban" button in at least two spots (one that was directly in the feed and another that comes up under Reports in the magazine panel). No matter what I do, it always shows up as "unban" in the mod log. However, there is a list of bans under the magazine panel, and that does show the accounts as banned.

So, I'm really not sure what is going on here. Maybe it's just a problem with the log and not with the banning itself?

Anyway, thanks again for pointing this out. Hopefully someone can figure out what is going on.

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testing 1 point 2 years ago

@bayaz Thank you! This is even worse than I thought! I will try some things out in the near future in order to find a stable way for banning accs.

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bayaz 2 points 2 years ago

What the... ugh. I've been doing this for months. Thanks for letting me know.

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testing 2 points 2 years ago

@bayaz It's you who gave me food for thought, alongside many other moderators! I only found out yesterday how to properly ban spam accs on kbin.social.

I really appreciate all efforts to grow and take care of communities, be it on kbin, on lemmy, or on mbin! Every day, I try to keep learning from other moderators.

Given the sheer lack of moderation tools, many mods do great work. I hope the situation will improve so that moderatoring will become easier.

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