Banning spam accounts
testing@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 20 points – 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.
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@shazbot @insomniac_lemon To be clear, you're talking about /m/food on kbin.social? And particularly the threads side?
I'm the mod for that community, and I'm not seeing any amazon links, gummies, etc. I'm usually pretty good about deleting those within at most 24 hours of them being posted. But, if you're still seeing them, either there's a glitch or I'm doing something wrong.
Right now, I'm seeing 51 threads total, and the newest one is a month old (tagliatelle link). Are you seeing something different?
I agree with you about the questionable food blogs and probably-ai-generated content. I've been on the fence about whether to delete those, but I decided to let it slide and hope that upvotes/downvotes would take care of it. Also, I didn't get any user reports about them, so that was another metric to consider. For now, I'm just doing the absolute minimum of deleting obvious drug spam and amazon links (or, at least, I thought I was). If you notice anything especially egregious (where on earth do you see this 18+ spam nonsense?!) and could take the time to report it, I would really appreciate it.
Amazon links no, that was Books and the other user misspoke in one of their comments.
The other stuff, you deleted some of it after I commented, some is still there. Screenshot attached, the last one is about food but is that user's only post and looks awfully like a thinly-veiled advertisement.
EDIT: I should have started with "thanks", by the way. I appreciate the response.
This is so weird. I don't see any of those first four posts. I see the fifth (I'm actually the downvote), and I agree it's sketchy, but I'm trying to get just the absolute worst out for now.
Also, I have two posts you don't have. I'm viewing this directly in Firefox -- are you in an app of some kind?
That is weird, and nope also Firefox. I see what you do if I log out though.
I checked, I don't seem to have that user blocked, and the spam still there then gone on logout/private-window is something else entirely.EDIT: I don't see those 2 posts because they are categorized as Macedonian. I have it set to English only. Though the posts look like they are in English.
Ouch, what a bug. I knew some of the moderation wasn't being federated, but I can't imagine how a kbin user isn't seeing the latest version.
To be clear, you see the spam when logged in, then don't see it logged out, then see it again when logged in again?
I don't see it regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. Also, I don't think I've ever been able to see it because I don't see the posts in a quick look through the moderation log.
Would you mind posting an issue about this? https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues Or, I can do it if you don't feel like it and don't mind me using your screenshots. If you do post it, just please emphasize that this makes it impossible for moderation to happen because the moderator literally cannot see the posts.
Thanks again for trying things out and sharing your info!
@bayaz
Correct.
I haven't used codeberg yet, so I'll just say sure you can use my screenshots/words. It also directly affects you as a mod more as you've said, anyway.
Using those usernames/profiles to look at the posts directly, I don't suppose there is anything that might detail what is going on? There are ~500 open issues, maybe this is some existing database/caching issue possibly related to post/community IDs? Though I am still not sure why viewing would differ by user.
Can you get me the full usernames including domains (e.g., PellyNews@blah.blah)? More info couldn't hurt when compiling the issue report.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe you are somehow "subscribed" to other domains because you follow some magazine/community there, and I am not, so the posts don't show up for me. That doesn't really make sense, but neither does anything else.
I did do a little searching for terms like "delete", "cache", and even "different", and didn't see this exact issue anywhere. The closest I found was this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/875 . It doesn't seem like a federation issue, though, since we are on the same instance. But, if you wanted to experiment further, you could try either downvoting or commenting on the spam to see whether that makes it visible to me.
They are kbin accounts, so typing them out should work as expected.
One of them had 2 downvotes already, but done and done
Okay, thanks for your patience. I think we've hit the limit of what we can do at this point.
Nothing changed with your downvotes or comments. Going through kbin.social/u/{user}, I was able to view and delete PellyNews's threads. I am unable to do anything with the other two users. Even though I can see they exist, the relevant threads do not show up for me under their profiles.
I'll file the issue and keep just deleting what I can until things are sorted out on the backend. Thanks again for your help on this.
I still see them, eg https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982256 or https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982254
Also, here's another thread from a different user: https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982032
EDIT: Though perhaps it makes more sense to not remove all of the ghostly posts, to make sure the root cause can hopefully be fixed
Looking at the modlog, the ones you removed were posts (microblogs). Relevant to the issue?
I also see the modlog showing the unban command, much like mentioned in the thread description here.
Nice catch!
With your direct links, I was able to see those threads. I attempted to delete two of them, and the modlog shows that I was successful. I've left the third for now as evidence for any developers who care to look.
Regarding "unban", I'm hoping that's just a bug in how things are printed. The ban does show up in the moderation log.
The issue has been reported: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1377
Let me know (or post there directly) if I missed or misstated anything.
@insomniac_lemon It ended up being super simple -- my profile was hiding the 18+ posts by default. All I had to do was uncheck a box, and everything appeared again. Kind of a clever way by the spammers of getting around some moderation if it was intentional. It sounds like the kbin devs might consider changing the defaults on that for moderators to avoid this in the future.
@bayaz @insomniac_lemon
Yep, I meant to say /books when I was talking about Amazon links. Sorry.
As for the posts on /food, I have totally vanilla settings (no language filtering or anything) and I saw all of the posts you both mentioned.
Well, with the exception of the garbage posts, because in answer to lemon's earlier question, those have long since been scrubbed on the filter side. But they did exist before I started filtering.
All of that low hanging fruit kind of stuff has been banished, and I am mainly working on edge cases at this point.