Feature requests for a lemmy moderation bot (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by AsudoxDev@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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 @rikudou@lemmings.world 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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[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 22 points 4 months ago

Trying to automate things and decrease mod burden is great, so I don't oppose OP's idea on general grounds. My issues are with two specific points:

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

Automated systems don't understand what people say within a context. As such, it's unjust and abusive to use them to punish people based on what they say.
This sort of automated system is extra easy to circumvent for malicious actors, specially since they need to be tuned in a way that lowers the amount of false positives (unjust bans) and this leads to a higher amount of false negatives (crap going past the radar).
Something that I've seen over and over in Reddit, that mods here will likely do in a similar way, is to shift the blame to automod. "NOOOO, I'm not unjust. I didn't ban you incorrectly! It was automod lol lmao"

Instead of those two I think that a better use of regex would be an automated reporting system, bringing potentially problematic users/pieces of content to the attention of human mods.

[-] AsudoxDev@programming.dev 8 points 4 months ago

Alright. Sounds fair. Instead of taking dangerous actions, I'll make it create a report instead. Though I'll probably keep the feature to punish members by their usernames via regex or word blacklist.

[-] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

Though I'll probably keep the feature to punish members by their usernames via regex or word blacklist.

This right here is the attitude that I have a problem with. I can think of one user who would get blacklisted right away because of their username alone. And that does not sit right with me.