I was almost ready to say that maybe they're just looking for "bot" in the UA. But, no. It must be "kbinbot" anywhere in the UA, and case insensitive. So, pretty deliberate it seems.
I was almost ready to say that maybe they're just looking for "bot" in the UA. But, no. It must be "kbinbot" anywhere in the UA, and case insensitive. So, pretty deliberate it seems.
I don't think it's assuming anything to say that they deliberately blocked user agents containing the text "kbinbot" (case insensitive). I think it's fairly clear that's exactly what has happened here. Instructions to test as many variations as you want yourself are right in the main post in the thread.
Now, what we cannot say is whether it was done with malicious intent. There's some plausible reasons they might do it that are not malicious.
I was more replying to the second paragraph. It's a pretty deliberate configuration choice on the web server.
Because, when you post here from kbin.social any other instance with kbinMeta@kbin.social will get a copy of that and vice-versa. But each side is exchanging posts from multiple magazines to multiple other instances. It's also balancing resource usage for people visiting the site too.
Also new instances are gradually fetching the back-catalog of posts for various magazines (and communities on lemmy). So all of this leads to a delay.
Anecdotally the delay is quite short this morning. Yesterday it reached up to 2 hours from my view at least.
You could plug in a USB SSD or HDD and make sure the DB and other regularly written data goes there. That would pretty much remove the problem.
I would wonder how well it would perform. The limited memory and cpu power surely would make database access not great under even moderate load.
This is what has made me think they've likely given an ultimatum to the moderators to re-enable their subs "or else", because they're coming back thick and fast right now.
This will (if they get it right) reduce the number of moderators they will need to replace to get control of the remaining large subs. It would have been better if more mods took a stand. A lot of the larger subs are still private or restricted. So, we'll see what happens I guess.
The problem with replacing a large number of mods is twofold. Finding enough competent (although maybe that's not such a requirement) people to step into their shoes is just one. Another is that there's no real way to hide this. Those people that might not have had a horse in the API race might have one in the "removing my sub's favourite mod" race.
It takes time. I just setup my own instance and I sent a comment from there, it took 40 minutes to arrive on kbin.social, upvotes and replies have not made it back to my instance yet some 45-60mins after they happened.