cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/51288619
Hi All,
Due to some ongoing issues with harassment campaigns, we’ve had to setup a rudimentary monitoring system for all new users.
- When a user’s signup is accepted, they will be automatically enrolled into the monitoring system. The admins team may also add accounts manually if they have been given a strike.
- The system will monitor all posts, comments and DMs sent by new users, and bring them to the attention of the admin team if it appears suspicious. In egregious cases, it will auto-remove posts and comments if required, but a human admin will always review and reverse any false positives as soon as required.
- Once we have validated that the user is not a spammer, they will be removed from the system.
We don’t want to go into too much detail on how it all works, but we can say that all the processing is being done locally on the instance server. For most of you, this wont have any impact, but some of you have been impacted by the systems false positives. It is also a good time to point out that DM messages are not private, and should not be used for anything that requires strong privacy.
There will likely be teething problems, but we are actively working on improving the bot to minimize impact and we are always open to feedback.
I generally don’t particularly see anything wrong with this. Spam and harassment is a weak point on lemmy and we’re all just coasting on good faith that dedicated actors won’t abuse it. Having tools to detect harassing isn’t a bad thing, especially when they mention the exact cases they’re trying to handle. At the end of the day, you need to decide if you trust your admins to handle this appropriately. If you don’t, then you can always switch servers or open your own.
Just letting you know that this post has been significantly altered from what it was when I posted this.
Now it looks like this mostly a PR issue where their basement nerd accidentally was allowed to do customer support for a brief second.