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[META]: ban @szmer.info? (self.technology)
submitted 1 year ago by pglpm to c/technology@lemmy.world

It seems this community is being targeted by ad bots. I see all of them come from a @szmer.info instance (or?). Maybe it should be banned?

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[-] quinten@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago

Mod from !support@lemmy.world here.

We're currently trying to get in contact with them to maybe help and sort out the spam issue. (Link)

Saw the post here and thought I'll drop my 2 cents.

[-] pglpm 12 points 1 year ago
[-] mishimaenjoyer@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

since it's a a smaller polish instance i'm not sure they're even aware that they are hosting bots and defederation should be the very last resort, so i's good the kbin team is reaching out.

[-] MBM@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago

The lemmy.world team, right? Unless they're both doing it

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 1 year ago

Definitely, it can redeferated once the admins purge the bots

[-] lemann@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago

There could be some communication issues there since szmer looks like a Polish instance, hopefully things can get worked out. Tired of seeing the throwaway ad accounts...

[-] Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've made a post on their meta community ( !wspolnota@szmer.info ), hopefully an admin will see it and will take care of the situation.

[-] enu@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately this isn’t an action that mods can take. The admins of each instance need to de-federate from it.

[-] pglpm 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I see, I didn't know about that, thank you. May I ask: is the instance where the community is hosted that should do this, or the instance(s) of the subscribers?

Please feel free to delete my post if it's pointless then!

[-] enu@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

I’m not actually sure how that works. If LW defederates does it block all users from that instance from posting? I would guess “yes” in that I believe the instance the community is hosted on plays a role in tracking posts to that community. If you’re curious, I would definitely ask one of the dev communities.

Will leave up for a little since I’m sure a lot of other people saw the barrage of spam from last night. Should be all cleaned up now.

Also, I do believe that is a legit instance, so it’s not likely it’ll be defederated, they’re likely a victim of the spammers as much as we are here… they just need to delete those accounts and block those IPs.

[-] pglpm 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, don't take my post too literally as I'm not very acquainted with the Fediverse yet :)

[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago

They are still running 18.1, I'm not sure how actively managed the instance is

[-] enu@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Ouch, that’s definitely way out of date and has several critical bugs in it that are unpatched.

I brought the spam issue from that instance to the attention of the admins for LW, they’re going to take a look into it. Will keep an eye out for more spamming today.

[-] kolektyw_szmer@szmer.info 3 points 1 year ago

Anything other than the custom emoji one? We're one of the oldest instances, running with limited resources and update when we either have the time and energy for that, or when we have to.

As for spam: we block spam accounts from other instances before their own mods nearly daily, including from the biggest ones. Chill.

[-] kolektyw_szmer@szmer.info 2 points 1 year ago

It is, to the point of developing it's own deployment system to be able to run lemmy on bare metal in a way we see fit, as opposed to the unpredictable cycle and frustrating process of using the main packages.

[-] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 year ago

It's a one way street, defederating from them means users here won't see the spam posts, but the users there will see the rest of the posts.

[-] enu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

But non-spammy regular users wouldn’t be able to post or interact at that point, right? Also, how would that affect users on a third party instance? For example, I’m on lemm.ee

Genuine question, not too familiar with how the backend of Lemmy works and am curious to learn more :)

[-] Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Take this with a grain of salt since im also not very fammiliar with the lemmy backend, but i think it would be like this:

If lemmy.world defederates from szmer.info all users from szmer (both spammers and normal users) would be able to see and comment on posts made on lemmy.world BUT those comments would only show up for other users on szmer.

For users on other instances (like lemm.ee) the situation would be the same as for users on lemmy.world .

Again im not an expert so this might be wrong (if it is feel free to correct me).

[-] enu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

That's how I had hoped it would work. So if it continues, just one instance can clean it up so all the others don't need to take any action.

Probably the easiest solution. Just had to remove another one, guess we'll see what happens.

this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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