We have temporarily locked posting on AskLemmy until the CSAM posting stops.

  • Corroded@leminal.space
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    9 months ago

    Is there a way AskLemmy and other major communities could prevent new users from making posts in the future?

    Like an account has to be over a month old to post for example. Maybe that could help prevent these kinds of disgusting attacks

    I don’t know if Lemmy has a moderator tool available that could do something like that though.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 months ago

      I don’t quite like that idea. It’s something I really hated on Reddit. It just discourages new people from joining. Besides, you could self host an instance with accounts claiming to be made in 1970.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        9 months ago

        Unfortunately there aren’t many great options right now. No one likes it, but people posting CSAM are the ones to blame there. They quite literally ruin it for everyone because they’re butthurt about something happening they didn’t like

        • BigMoe@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          Do we know what they are butthurt about? There is never an excuse for what they are doing, but I’m curious what happened to set it off if a reason I known

          • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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            9 months ago

            Nope, they’re too cowardly to use their actual accounts and are making them anonymously. All we know is that rather than being mature about a mod action and simply leaving and creating an account elsewhere they decided to do this.

      • Corroded@leminal.space
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        9 months ago

        Good point. I didn’t think about how easy that would be to fake.

        That said I would still prefer it to some subreddit’s cryptic karma requirements. If it worked I mean.

      • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Are new instances automatically federated? If not, then it seems like making an instance, then hosting content enough to be federated, would be an awful waste of time and money, as I’d expect an instance like that would be quickly defederated.

        • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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          9 months ago

          Somewhat. All the communities have to be looked up manually by users, and followed to continue federating the content into that instance.

          But for this purpose the answer is yes. At least as far as I know, you can immediately start posting to other instances. Otherwise private instances would be of no use.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        9 months ago

        I don’t like it either. Age/karma requirements work under an inherently flawed idea, that you’re guilty (i.e. a shitposter) unless proved contrariwise (by using an old or karma-ful enough account), and damn easy to avoid if you’re determined to shit on a community.

        IMO better ideas revolve around

        • Decreasing the surface of attack. In this case: only text posts allowed, there’s barely any legitimate reason to allow image posts here anyway.
        • Proper tools so mods can upstream rule violation to the admins. I’m almost certain that admins can see the IP of the posters, they should use that info to ban the posters alongside it. Perhaps in some situations the mods could even be granted temporary rights to see the IP of the posters? (Just an idea.)
        • Proper tools so mods have an easier time spotting potentially problematic content.

        Sadly they all depend on the software, and Lemmy isn’t exactly known for having good mod tools.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            9 months ago

            I’m aware that IP bans inconvenience users who did nothing wrong. But I feel like this can be alleviated:

            • make the IP ban temporary. The idea is to force the spammer to get another IP or give up, not to use the IP itself as the enforcement.
            • IP-ban only account creation, not activity. So even if you’re using the same IP, as long as you already have an account, you should be unaffected.

            But… well, we’re back into “lemmy needs better built-in mod tools” territory.

          • pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafe
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            9 months ago

            Then hosts need to ban VPNs.

            They need to use cookies that attach a unique identifier to each machine to enforce bans per machine. Hash the cookie so it can’t be edited. If a user clears their cookies, they need to put in a special private key to get back into their account.

            Or just make users scan in ID or pay with a credit card to gain membership.

            None of those ideas are perfect but they are needed for better ban enforcement overall anyway.

      • Corroded@leminal.space
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        9 months ago

        Understood. Is that an option for moderators though?

        Like I said I don’t know if Lemmy gives you that option or if you’d need to setup some kind of bot or an instance level option.

        • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          That would need to be a bot. The problem is that the spammer would just move on to the next community (which they have just done by moving to askLemmy@lemmy.ml I just put a tool up that automatically notifies a bunch of admins, mods and community team members when a post get’s reported more than 3 times, so please report the posts if you see them.

    • Preventing any posting in general might be a bit too restrictive IMO. However I think new users, or users using VPNs probably should not be allowed to post images in general so freely.

      I believe lemm.ee has a minimum account age limit before users can upload directly to the instance, and dbzer0 scans all user uploaded images for anything that could be questionable.

      Perhaps there should be additional restrictions on stuff linking to images outside of lemmy? I blocked the domain within moments of it appearing on my feed, absolutely disgusting