So we’ve seen the complaints and the reports and boy oh boy are there complaints and reports.
I’ve discussed the account with the other mods and admins multiple times, and while we agree the volume is a lot, it doesn’t point to a botfarm or multiple people using the account.
Obsessive? Absolutely, but not technically rule breaking… Until today.
Today they indescriminately posted the same story three times from three different sources apparently solely to flood the channel showing a decided lack of judgement.
It’s a valid story from a valid source, the original has been kept here:
https://lemmy.world/post/21098916
The others have been removed as duplicates.
I’m also applying a 15 day temp ban on the account.
“15 days? That’s oddly specific! What’s in 15… OH!”
I want to second this. I understand the mods prefer a case-by-case approach, but I think that leaves a very specific pathway for bad actors to exploit. Monk was posting a purely insane amount of comments along with a very high but not as insane number of posts, and almost all of it was low-value, and often copy-pasted from a previous comment.
Do the mods even have easy access to the kind of data your script was pulling? I think that may be part of the issue is that the mod tools with Lemmy are lacking/limited.
He had a standard copypasta for people accusing him of being a troll. If that’s not trolling I don’t know what is
Ha! Yeah - in fact it evolved and expanded to the extent of almost all of his interactions being simply copying and pasting his responses ad nauseum. Very rarely saw him say anything he hadn’t already parroted back dozens and dozens of times. I kinda get why some people accused him of being a bot, because it’s hard to imagine a human deriving anything out of those sorts of interactions.
The number of comments/posts makes me think they’re getting paid per comment or post (or maybe per reply?)
In any case, I still find it funny that in one of their earlier posts I called Stein a Russian stooge and they took personal offense to that. (for a moment, I wondered if maybe they were stein.)
There are multiiple Stein Stans in the community who report anything remotely anti-Stein, even (especially?) when it’s true.
I am not entirely sure what tools they have, but yeah the script was just pulling data from the public api. Anyone can write this script, and I will open source it if folks are interested. It could be good to have a set of tools similar to this one which mods could run with minimal effort.
Mod tools are pretty limited.
We have a queue of reported posts and reported comments, from there it’s a manual lookup of user history in their profile and on the public modlog.
For actions, we can remove comments and posts, lock posts, ban users temporarily or permanently, feature posts in the community, and promote users to mods.
Thanks for that. Kinda what I figured. I may work some more on tools to help. Would you be interested? Specifically in simple scripts you can run after a pretty easy setup and running a single command typically.
That would be awesome of you.