cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/18411894

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 content via word blacklist/regex
  • Ban members of communities by their usernames/bios 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.

  • dbx12@programming.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    Lemmy does not support karma, but account age if I’m not mistaken. Maybe add a rule to require a certain account age before accepting a post. The main idea is to prevent astroturfing, spam accounts and socket puppets for ban evasion.

    Not sure how effective this is since violators could setup an own instance which lies about the account age. Still quite the investment for ban evasion IMHO.

    • asudox@programming.devOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      Sounds good as well. Karma would be bad but account age seems somewhat reasomable as an optional protection. Accepted.

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      0·
      3 months ago

      I’ve set my age to 100 years as a gag, I don’t think you can rely on that stuff. Plus, creating an account is free, so spammers can just create a bunch of sockpuppets beforehand.

      I can still see a use for a moderation bot, though; piping everything through a tool like SpamAssasin could filter out those kbin spam waves that happened every now and then almost automatically.