Context here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1641350
Someone messaged this bot and told it to add PS5 to its community list. If it was someone here, please DM me or fess up here and let me know. I won’t ban or take action on anyone, but I would have appreciated being approached about this first. I’m not even that mad tbh as I think I the bot is interesting, but I need to vet these things before they are added to the community.
Furthermore, this bot violates lemmy.world rules since the maintainer account is not listed in the bot bio, and because it was added without moderator permission.
Anyway, please reach out if it was you so we can clear the air and talk about it. DM me if you want to keep it private.
In case no one here added it, I’ll be messaging people on the instance where this is hosted to track down the maintainer. I don’t like that there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove the bot from the community once it has been added without banning it.
Edit:
After investigating this further I have determined that this bot auto adds itself to all federated communities with feddit.works that at least one feddit.works user is subscribed to. Lo and behold, feddit.works has 1 subscriber to PS5. So it looks like during the migration, 1 person over there saw us and subscribed, which then triggered the bot to auto add itself. So no one appears to be at fault.
I’ll still leave this post up for a little bit so people here can see a new rule I’m going to add to the sidebar:
New Rule: If you wish to add or recommend a bot for the betterment of the PS5 community it must be endorsed by the Mods prior to implementation and must follow instance-wide rules.
I’m the case of the piped bot, I will leave it unbanned for now, and attempt to have the maintainer edit the bot to follow instance wide rules, as well as an unsubscribe feature. I will discuss this issue with @[email protected] and we will make a determination together.
Edit 2:
I spoke with the bot maintainer, and their bot was made prior to the implementation of the new rules for lemmy.world. They weren’t aware of the new rules. They will be making updates to the bot to be compliant but it may take some time.
Final Edit:
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I’ve decided that I’m going to ban the bot. Based on the feedback here and where the upvotes are going, it seems most are annoyed with it, while some may benefit from it. Ultimately though, banning it doesn’t prevent people from using piped, but leaving it annoys a lot more people than it helps. In a place where discussions are limited, I believe seeing a reply to a post entices others to want to join a newly budding discussion, and being met with a bot reply is damaging to that end. Those that need piped to bypass YouTube for various reasons such as school, work, personal preference, etc. can use dedicated extensions or paste their links from YouTube to piped themselves. For submissions, piped links will still be allowed, so if using piped is important to you, I encourage to contribute to the community and submit the types of content you would like to see. This decision is final.
I found that bot really annoying and blocked it. It’s spamming piped to make it a thing when it’s not. If people want to link to piped they would do it to begin with.
The bot is useful for providing an automated mirror to people with adblock that are getting blocked by youtube’s new adblocking bans. There’s also several cases where work and school networks will block youtube. Average users don’t think about this (and shouldn’t be expected to) but it’s just useful functionality to have for people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access these links.
This is a very fair point. I am leaning toward allowing it to stay, as users can block it themselves if they find it bothersome, rather than me making the decision for everyone. I still have to discuss this with @[email protected] though, so our decision may change.
Edit: see my final thoughts/determination above
Yeah, me too. It’s everywhere.
Thanks, I will take this feedback into consideration. I have messaged the bot maintainer and await a reply
I also find it a bit annoying, but I also think blocking it is easy enough that there’s no reason for a community to ban the bot. That way people that like it can use it and people that don’t can block it themselves.
Maintainer seems to be kavin [at] feddit.rocks
Thank you! For transparency this is the message I just sent them:
Hi Kavin, I’m the lead mod over on [email protected]. Your piped link bot was added to my community without my permission. I see in the code that it gets auto added to communities federated with feddit.rocks once one subscriber joins said community. I wanted to let you know that your bot violates recently implemented lemmy.world rules regarding bots. The 2 violations it makes are:
- The maintainer account is not listed in the bot bio (that would be your contact info in the bot bio)
- You need to receive permission from mods prior to posting in their communities.
Personally I can see value in your bot, but you are risking having it banned from the entire lemmy.world instance due to these violations. Furthermore, on a personal note, I have issue with the lack of an unsubscribe feature in the bot. It can be messaged a community name to be added, but I do not see a way to unsubscribe a community from the bot. If there is a way to unsubscribe, please let me know and update your GitHub with how to unsubscribe communities.
Please respond back and implement the above changes. I will allow your bot to stay in my community for the time being, but if the above changes are not implemented in a timely manner or I do not hear back from you, I will be forced to ban the bot outright.
I will discuss the value proposition of your bot with my mod team and community and make a determination as to whether we wish to keep it in our community or not.
Thanks for your understanding!
