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Seriously. I hope @ernest is doing okay. He said he had some updates in the pipeline, but this outage had me thinking this was the end of kbin lol

"Help us @ernest , you're our only hope"

If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.

A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:

Using KES, enable General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.

Next, enable General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.

@billy nomates Your passion for really shines through in your writing.

@zapatas Your insights are always thought-provoking.

@GordonFreeman
It really depends on the very magazine. Basically, it's magazines with Ernest as sole moderator where these problems occur. I'd give it a wait.
@Haus

Using this approach, I am seeing none of those posts on /science. I updated the filters a bit today. The top post is a legitimate article from 2024-04-13 and is by HeartyBeast.

Now, I understand that this is seen as an unnecessary step (too fancy) for some. People want zero ads out of the box without anything extra. So I'm thinking about the next approach here.

Framing the problem:

• Filtering should be automatic
• End-user wants zero additional setup
• There is no active upstream development
• It's not possible to inherit moderation of a magazine due to some queue of moderator application requests that is not being approved

The third point and fourth points are important here, since that's currently intractable. You can't reconcile zero additional setup with that.

But let's suppose becoming moderator of a defunct magazine (point 4) were possible while point 3 remained unresolved. In other words, at least moderators can try to pick up the pieces. Something being underestimated here is how annoying it would be for the moderator to manually cull posts every single day. I think you would have instant turnover after a couple of weeks once the tedium sets in. Manual solution is not good. Clearly, automation is needed on the moderation side.

So assuming you could actually inherit a magazine, but with no guarantee of upstream development, what about restructuring the tool above so that it's for moderators, instead of end-users? That's pretty easy, and I could make it something the moderator clicks once and it's done, auto-banning the posts. This is a pretty good method.

But you can't inherit moderation right now, so that's back to square one.

Realistically, that leaves these options at the moment:

• Wait (a long time) and see
• Use the tool above and make magazines readable, albeit at some sacrifice of convenience (?)
• Migrate to another instance

Third approach is the path of least resistance and is best for most casual users. Second is for diehards who cannot move instances due to some personal or technical reason. First approach is the most annoying and eventually leads to the third approach after frustration sets in.

Pick your poison, I guess. I can't think of any other prophylactic approach at the moment, maybe this comment triggers some idea.

@insomniaclemon It ended up being super simple -- my profile was hiding the 18+ posts by default. All I had to do was uncheck a box, and everything appeared again. Kind of a clever way by the spammers of getting around some moderation if it was intentional. It sounds like the kbin devs might consider changing the defaults on that for moderators to avoid this in the future.

The issue has been reported: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1377

Let me know (or post there directly) if I missed or misstated anything.

I was able to view and delete PellyNews's threads
I'll file the issue and keep just deleting what I can until things are sorted out on the backend

I still see them, eg https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982256 or https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982254
Also, here's another thread from a different user: https://kbin.social/m/food/t/982032
EDIT: Though perhaps it makes more sense to not remove all of the ghostly posts, to make sure the root cause can hopefully be fixed

Looking at the modlog, the ones you removed were posts (microblogs). Relevant to the issue?

I also see the modlog showing the unban command, much like mentioned in the thread description here.

Using those usernames/profiles to look at the posts directly, I don't suppose there is anything that might detail what is going on?

Can you get me the full usernames including domains (e.g., [email protected])? More info couldn't hurt when compiling the issue report.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe you are somehow "subscribed" to other domains because you follow some magazine/community there, and I am not, so the posts don't show up for me. That doesn't really make sense, but neither does anything else.

I did do a little searching for terms like "delete", "cache", and even "different", and didn't see this exact issue anywhere. The closest I found was this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/875 . It doesn't seem like a federation issue, though, since we are on the same instance. But, if you wanted to experiment further, you could try either downvoting or commenting on the spam to see whether that makes it visible to me.

@bayaz

To be clear, you see the spam when logged in, then don't see it logged out, then see it again when logged in again?

Correct.

Or, I can do it if you don't feel like it and don't mind me using your screenshots

I haven't used codeberg yet, so I'll just say sure you can use my screenshots/words. It also directly affects you as a mod more as you've said, anyway.

Using those usernames/profiles to look at the posts directly, I don't suppose there is anything that might detail what is going on? There are 500 open issues, maybe this is some existing database/caching issue possibly related to post/community IDs? Though I am still not sure why viewing would differ by user.

Ouch, what a bug. I knew some of the moderation wasn't being federated, but I can't imagine how a kbin user isn't seeing the latest version.

To be clear, you see the spam when logged in, then don't see it logged out, then see it again when logged in again?

I don't see it regardless of whether I'm logged in or not. Also, I don't think I've ever been able to see it because I don't see the posts in a quick look through the moderation log.

Would you mind posting an issue about this? https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues Or, I can do it if you don't feel like it and don't mind me using your screenshots. If you do post it, just please emphasize that this makes it impossible for moderation to happen because the moderator literally cannot see the posts.

Thanks again for trying things out and sharing your info!

@bayaz @insomniaclemon

Yep, I meant to say /books when I was talking about Amazon links. Sorry.

As for the posts on /food, I have totally vanilla settings (no language filtering or anything) and I saw all of the posts you both mentioned.

Well, with the exception of the garbage posts, because in answer to lemon's earlier question, those have long since been scrubbed on the filter side. But they did exist before I started filtering.

All of that low hanging fruit kind of stuff has been banished, and I am mainly working on edge cases at this point.

@bayaz Thank you! This is even worse than I thought! I will try some things out in the near future in order to find a stable way for banning accs.

@shazbot @insomniaclemon To be clear, you're talking about /m/food on kbin.social? And particularly the threads side?

I'm the mod for that community, and I'm not seeing any amazon links, gummies, etc. I'm usually pretty good about deleting those within at most 24 hours of them being posted. But, if you're still seeing them, either there's a glitch or I'm doing something wrong.

Right now, I'm seeing 51 threads total, and the newest one is a month old (tagliatelle link). Are you seeing something different?

I agree with you about the questionable food blogs and probably-ai-generated content. I've been on the fence about whether to delete those, but I decided to let it slide and hope that upvotes/downvotes would take care of it. Also, I didn't get any user reports about them, so that was another metric to consider. For now, I'm just doing the absolute minimum of deleting obvious drug spam and amazon links (or, at least, I thought I was). If you notice anything especially egregious (where on earth do you see this 18+ spam nonsense?!) and could take the time to report it, I would really appreciate it.

Lots of places that list ernest as the only moderator. Some I've seen are on communities such as: fediverse, internet, opensource, science, random (which also pulls content from various places, which had the added minus that spam from other instances will not have deletions federated). Even the ask communities are sometimes hit, or for instance in this community there's a spam thread for pills in Dubai right below this one in new (from 2 days ago).

Specifically I'm talking about stuff you'll either see piled up in the new feed OR in the 'random threads'/posts section. My new feed isn't lotsa spam like it was earlier, but the sidebar currently is.

Image link for non-Kbin. Also, BUFO TOAD VENOM

Sounds good! Migration probably won't happen today, but maybe tomorrow or the day after if we get lucky. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem while trying to set up Mbin due to one of the mbin/kbin dependencies suddenly disappearing out of the blue (see here).

@bayaz It's you who gave me food for thought, alongside many other moderators! I only found out yesterday how to properly ban spam accs on kbin.social.

I really appreciate all efforts to grow and take care of communities, be it on kbin, on lemmy, or on mbin! Every day, I try to keep learning from other moderators.

Given the sheer lack of moderation tools, many mods do great work. I hope the situation will improve so that moderatoring will become easier.