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Feature requests for a lemmy moderation bot (self.opensource)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by AsudoxDev to c/[email protected]

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Hello Lemmings!

I am thinking of making a community moderation bot for Lemmy. This new bot will have faster response times with the help of Lemmy webhooks, an amazing plugin for Lemmy instances by @[email protected] to add webhook support. With this, there is no need to frequently call the API at a fixed interval to fetch new data. Any new data will be sent via the webhook directly to the bot backend. This allows for actions within seconds, thus making it an effective auto moderation tool.

I have a few features I thought of doing:

Welcome messages
Auto commenting on new posts
Scheduled posts
~~Punish content authors or take action on~~ Auto report content via word blacklist/regex
Ban members of communities by their usernames via word blacklist or regex
Auto community lockdown during spam

What other features do you think are possible? Please let me know. Any questions are also welcome.

Community requested features:

Strike system

Strikes are added to a certain member of the community and the member will be temporarily banned within a time period if their strike count reaches a certain threshold

Post creation restriction by account age

If an account's age is lower than X, remove the post.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Half the features are helpful and the others are obnoxious or useless reddit vestiges. Auto banning users, locking communities, deleting posts is all rather harmful and not conducive to interesting discussion and posts. Welcome messages and auto mod comments on every post are also plain terrible.

Make a slim bot with moderation tools that helps mods and admins to do their tasks more efficiently and comfortably, but dont offload the mod role itself to the bot. That is one of the worst parts if reddit.

[–] AsudoxDev 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Your idea of a "bot" is yet just manual labor for mods with "advanced" features.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Honestly a bot moderator is just open source enshittification of the fediverse if you did it like this. Bots have no nuance, do not understand context and are generally unable to apply reason to a situation.

The most egregious suggestion is user name based bans, this is 100% going to remove a bunch of users without real cause. Or having automod comment the same irrelevant headline on every single post is just causing spam and kills the comment count function.

In my opinion the bots should do all the tediousness for the moderators, and there may even be scenarios where a bot content filter could be invaluable, but in general any tool you put out there will also be used to its fullest extent by at least one person.

Like cops with too many powers, eventually they abuse it for everything.

[–] AsudoxDev 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

What exactly am I to do when mods use my bot maliciously? I just try to program features into the bot that might be used by the moderators. Everything is optional, if the features are used maliciously, it's not my fault but the moderators'. What fault does the creator of knives have when they are being used to murder people instead of cutting vegetables?

I do appreciate your comment though, some misc tasks don't necessarily need to exist such as welcome messages and auto comments on posts. Actually I'll remove welcome messages, they are a waste of API calls. Maybe auto comment on posts as well but scheduled posts are (most likely) staying. It is a moderation bot after all. I'll consider your compliant. Thanks.