this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Lemmings.world

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Stuff relating to the Lemmy instance Lemmings.world

founded 1 year ago
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“ community link fixer” bot spamming comments (lemmy.ninja)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja to c/lemmings_world_instance@lemmings.world
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Can someone here explain why the community link fixer bot is spamming comments all over the fediverse?

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[–] coldhotman@nrsk.no 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would assume the creator thinks it's a community service. If you don't like it, you can block the individual offending accounts (there's also a ChatGPT bot I've heard). If there's too many bot accounts to individually block, you can consider petitioning your instance admins to defederate.

[–] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I admit I was pretty annoyed when I wrote that post, but I have three really big criticisms of this bot:

  1. It's spam where a YSK post would do. Instead of one post where the bot author could raise awareness of whatever issue he's facing and debate/learn about it, he has decided to spam every person who uses the @. link format. Following people around and tut-tutting them about their perceived wrongdoings is a toxic behavior.
  2. The bot is vague. It says that some users have problems with this format. Which users? What problems do they have? At least explain the problem if you're going to hit me with a notification by complaining about it.
  3. It's wrong. The @. works just fine. [Edit: @j_roby@slrpnk.net was able to provide an advantage for using the !notation, at least for users of Lemmy's UI.. This just reinforces the problem with the vagueness of the bot's reply. If it had explained what it was trying to achieve, I could have tested this on my own and learned something. This still doesn't help the users who can't use this proprietary link format, like Mastodon users, as mentioned by @coldhotman@nrsk.no below.]
  4. It is actively doing harm to kbin users. Correct me if I'm wrong of course, but if you are a kbin user, the !@ link format does not work to search for a Lemmy community. Kbin users need the @. link format.