I spend a lot of time downvoting and reporting and I've volunteered to co-mod the worst offending subs that I'm subnscribed to. It's not clear that any of this has any effect.
At this point, it feels like a bit of a lost cause.
I'm honestly not sure. I haven't been seeing too much of these problem accounts myself. I moderate m/politics and it hasn't been a problem for us yet. I would suggest making a note of which magazines you are seeing this behavior on, and if it's something that is up your alley, reach out to Ernest to ask for moderation privileges. He's very happy to give them to others who are dedicated.
I’ve volunteered for several over the last month. Never heard a thing. -in particular science, fediverse, tech where large amounts of spam seem to occur and which seem abandoned
Facebook doing edu (initially only one school) only was to target a specific audience. Google followed the exclusivity model to gain hype and encourage word of mouth.
Neither did it for security reasons and both switched to open sign-ups once they reached a certain level of users.
Why don't automated spam systems use them then? Its easy for an individual but its not super automately like google. At least at my alma matter its not.
I think you're thinking 4 year college, not 2 years. It takes a lot of effort and money to apply to a 4 year school. It takes like 5 minutes to apply at your local community college online and get a .edu email address, and it's free.
Using .edu as some sort of validation is a terrible idea because it's something anyone can get with just a few minutes of work.
yeah thats for an an individual though. A robotic spam account that needs to make a thousand accounts automatically is not going to make one so easily. spam from individuals is much easier to deal with than machine spam.
It is stupid easy to get a free .edu account. It will not hamper spammers in the slightest. Even if they don’t want to make a few .edu accounts a day to do their spamming, they can just buy .edu accounts in bulk for about 10 cents per. No one is making thousands of kbin accounts to spam from, they make a handful a day, and use them till they get banned. Then they make a few more.
.edu accounts are a terrible way to try and prevent spam on kbin. There is literally an industry around generating fake .edu accounts. You can buy them in bulk. Some colleges receive 10’s of thousands of fake applications a month trying to get free .edu emails.
Yeah I had no idea they could be bought it bulk. I thought you had to be registered. Granted there are all the for profit colleges now. Would not be surprised if they straight sold them directly.
Metafilter had a charge of a dollar or two to sign up, and no recurring payments. Seems like a good way to prevent spammers.
Not too much of a hurdle to cross, especially if payments are thru Amazon or some other existing service ppl have trust in. Any funds go to server costs.
This might be a good idea, at least until Ernest gets back. To my knowledge, he's the only instance admin, so as long as he's inactive, the spammers won't get dealt with (especially on magazines he moderates, like /m/tech).
Ideally, there could be another admin or two to deal with this stuff when he's not available, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I agree that this may be the only real solution for the time being. I have personally been trying to submit good content to my favorite magazines to combat some of the spam, but there is a real influx of it and it's making it difficult to use the site.
I spend more time blocking spammers than anything else. I’m sure it will improve once this issue gets more attention, but for now I think I’ll take a break from this site.
Ernest hasn't abandoned kbin this time, he did post an update last week.
Today, I'm going for a minor procedure at the hospital, and I won't be available for the next 2-4 days. When I return, I'll push all the corrections and fixes I've been working on and present plans for the near future.
Him not being back yet probably means the hospital procedure didn't go as smoothly as expected, but he's not gone on purpose.
It seems like having more admins here would be greatly beneficial in combatting that problem. Is Ernest open to having additional admins? AFAIK he is the only one, and he's cleary biting off more than he can chew.
So you went and thought: "Let's take this chance to make an unverified claim and advertise this other instances in a single post!"
but it was a shitty move, let me tell you.
Are you guys browsing by new? Do you moderate active communities? I'm just curious to understand why we seem to have such different experiences since I only encounter spam once or twice per week, but I definitely spend way too many hours scrolling.
I think a lot of us have had the same thoughts looking around kbin.
We all appreciate the work Ernest has done, but we really need someone to dedicate some time to picking out a team to help him, but it seems like that's not happening for whatever reason. I know there's a few other people in the codeberg, but I believe there was a falling out there. What we really need in addition to that though is just generic admins.
Ernest said in a previous post with some Mbin drama that he's very, very slow to trust people, and that's why he's been slow to give anyone else admin access to the project.
That may have been okay when only a few hundred people were using Kbin, but the project far outgrew what a single person can manage, especially since he's not only the main developer of the backend and frontend of Kbin, but also the only admin, moderator of multiple communities, AND decided to tackle making a Mobile Kbin app since that other one became vaporware. That is WAY too much for a single person to handle and still have any sort of existence offline.
This has been brought to his attention, but as you mentioned, nothing changes, and he continues the cycle of putting incredible load on himself, and then burning out. It's not sustainable, and unfortunately his lack of trust in others, and an unhealthy level of self-reliance, will ultimately keep Kbin from thriving.
I understand the desire to keep kbin a solo project in order to maintain control over it, but if this is going to see any success in the long term, then there needs to be a team. I like kbin over lemmy for the interface and mocroblog integration, but the spam and lack of updates are taking its toll. At the very least, there needs to be another admin or two to look after things whenever Ernest isn't around.
At this point, the best thing would just to move to an instance using mbin, a fork created by many devs who contributed to and wanted to improve kbin but were upset at lack of progress. With Ernest's many absences all the improvements weren't being merged. Many instances using the name kbin, such as the one I'm on, have switched to mbin long ago and have many of the features and fixes that have been requested and long waited for.
This time is probably unrelated to @ernest's supposed inactivity. Actually, his another /kbin server, https://karab.in has been brought back on 15 of February.
Oh wow, what a day for the fediverse huh? Kbin's infrastructure went down, Lemmy.ml's certs expired (or so Firefox told me), and a ton of Misskey servers got hacked and started botspamming everyone.
Exactly this. There’s no way to know what’s going on when kbin goes down. It would be nice if there was a kbin Mastodon account or something people could check for information when the site is down.
kbinMeta
Najstarsze
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.