I think we need to add a couple more barriers to prevent spam. What about limiting posting to X amount of posts, or for new users or something?
I think we just need more features, like a report spam button, spam/ approval queues, modmail, etc.
In my experience requiring moderator approval for the first post a user makes is the most efficient spam fighting method as spammers usually don’t try very hard to hide the fact that they are spammers.
I think it sounds like a good solution, although that brings another issue to the table, that being the enormous amount of communities with dead administrators on Lemmy, which will make everything harder.
So all their posts/comments are hidden from everyone, until an admin manually approves? It sounds like a good option, but would require a bunch of work to implement. Mostly frontend changes for the review, on the backend it mainly needs a new user column bool reviewed_by_admin.
Yeah like that. It is a common way to fight spam on traditional forums and is pretty much the only thing that consistently worked for me in 15+ years moderating forums with huge spam problems.
Sounds good, would you like to open an issue for this?
backend or frontend side?
Backend
More than reviewed by admin, would be reviewed by moderators of the specific community.
It’s a horrible system for new users. It would kill growth in an instant.
Spam is only spam when there’s a number of substantively similar posts. A first post doesn’t meet that test, by definition.
I understand that it is annoying, but I think it’s because we’re still a small community. when our numbers become much higher, users will be almost enough to fight spamming. big subs will have enough users sorting by new and downvoting spams that they won’t get any visibility, and they will have enough mods to remove spams. this is what I said on a similar post:
I think once we get bigger and report functionality gets added, it won’t be that much of a problem anymore. it’s important to note that any anti-spam method comes at the risk of frustrating users, discrimination and potential for abuse. we could enforce a certain account age or positive karma for posts, or we could introduce shadow bans, or we could make a button for trusted users to empower them, but that would be empowering them over normal users.
once we get really big though, then just upvotes and downvotes would be enough to throw spams into the dark realm of the forgotten, never to be seen again.
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I agree on the need for a technical friction on new users ability to post – and especially on the main communities that are federated with other instances.
I disagrees with that, “throttling” postings is dumb. Just moderate your communities more closely if you don’t likes’ the contents.
This is a brainstorm post, not a peer-reviewed paper on moderating fediverse :) Mods with finite resources cannot compete with automated systems. The signal to noise ratio will keep increasing if a new account can post 10 items immediately they join. The alternative could be restricted signups (signups by invitations, recommendations) even though a low hanging fruit could be temporal throttling for new users. Something got to give in the long run.
I think signing up by invite is not so good because it will prevent people to join easily, but I honestly can’t think of someone making more than 10 posts just after joining and them not being a bot, and if you aren’t I don’t think it’s a big issue to wait a bit more. Obviously the best option would be to have more mods, but there are a lot of communities with dead admins, and the ones that have active admins don’t have more than one. Even if they have more than two, they generally live pretty close and their time zones make at least an eight hour gap where no one will be active.
It’s honestly USUALLY not that difficult to dedicate sufficient time to prune a community here as needed within reasons. Beside a well moderated community is less likely to be spammed in the long run considering it will be less efforts than it’s worth.
Problems USUALLY arises because there’s a lack of moderation, not because new users should be pulled back or from being signed up. This is more evident in game servers and believe me I can tell them apart what’s a well oiled game server from one that isn’t. Same goes for online communities.
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Which specific limits would you apply on lemmy.ml, and for whom?
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Sorry I dont remember, but it sounds similar to the limitations for new accounts which discourse has.
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Ah thanks. Unfortunately @dessalines@lemmy.ml says that he is strictly against this.
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How about that a moderator’s bot removes all posts and votes until approval? Then the bot will cancel its removing after the approval. In this case, lemmy requires no change.
This instance does not allow bots, and the moderation system, although more complicated to implement (maybe) will be useful in the longer run.
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