Hi everyone,

I think it has become clear that many bot accounts are swarming the communities. Sometimes we can’t be sure whether a specific account is a bot, but there are some clues. I will not post the clues here since they could be used by bot creators to bypass the rules.

Lemmy (the software) currently doesn’t have tools to automate moderation, so everything has to be moderated manually.

That said, I will be adding a few anti-bot rules to the /c/comicstrips community:

• A limit of two posts per person per day.
• Bots are not allowed. There will be heavy moderation of suspected bot accounts. If an account is identified as a bot, its posts will be deleted and it will receive a permanent ban.
• Banned users will have their posts removed.

And thank you to everyone in the community who reports possible spammers and bots. It helps a lot.

Here is the previous post that I fixed before, which contains a few discussions about this subject: https://lemmy.world/post/42127013

Do you have any comments or suggestions? I’m listening.

(This is not the future that Asimov expected.)

Would it be possible to slowly build a whitelist for users that you confirm are legitimate?

For context, I subscribe to web comics through RSS feeds, and sometimes I'll sit down to look through the feed and then schedule out posts for the few good ones. I can totally keep it to the 2 posts per day limit, but I'm worried that I might forget one day in the future. It's hard to keep track of community specific posting rules 😅

I totally understand if the extra posts get removed, this is more about not getting banned by an automated system.

I have been identified as a bot account because of my use of a VPN. I am not a bot so the system is not working perfectly. Thanks

Is there only one mod? If needed, I can help! Especially if we create a "credit the artist" rule. :3

You're my hero. Hope automation (sensibly implemented) reaches mods soon!