Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

      • utopianfiat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        I think commenters are getting a little uppity

        What praytell the fuck do you mean by this term specifically

      • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
        41·
        1 year ago

        Maybe it’s this topic and how it intermeshes with technology. Some people seem to think that there’s a technical solution for this already (one that works as well if not better than human moderators).

        So 4chan has this problem a lot but they are also based in the US where its most definitely illegal and they IP ban people and I think for the most part it works. It did suck though - I don’t go on there anymore but in the last few years I did, if I was on mobile, I would often get hit with a region ban because so many people in that area were banned that they just decided to block an entire IP region to prevent anyone else posting illegal content.

        maybe look into IP and region banning to prevent someone from just making new accounts.

          • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
            31·
            1 year ago

            Region banning would prevent anyone in the area from posting. I even mentioned that I use to come across bans for other people. In the case of 4chan, when they region ban, its possible someone else will be prevented from posting.

            Not to mention, does this now mean that 4 chan allows CSAM for certain regions? Yikes No its against their TOS entirely. It’s readable on their site and they do enforce rules even though they also enable people to be shitty in other ways.

            Now, if you want to talk about legality in other countries - that’s a different discussion. The internet is open to the WORLD. And all I would be comfortable confirming is that it’s definitely illegal in the US where I am. I’m not gonna get into other countries where it might not be illegal. I don’t know enough about those places to be able to tell you more.

            Basically a region ban would be similar to just pulling that instance down. Preventing whatever region that person was posting in would prevent them from posting as well as making local accounts to try and post more.

            When I would be downtown where I live, and got a ban that wasn’t meant for me, but I was in the region that was banned, I was able to appeal my ban. In order to appeal, you have to be good at using your words because a person has to sit there and read the appeal to make the decision to unban or not. Mine always went through but I also am capable of talking things out and I’m smart enough to know when to properly explain myself.

            Other people didn’t get their appeals and I would see them complain about it elsewhere.

            Anyway, you don’t need to condescend to me. I’m not against what you’re saying. I agree with a lot of what you said in other comments.

              • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
                3·
                1 year ago

                Today I’ve been responding a lot to the idea that CSAM is easy to fix and that for reasons unknown it just hasn’t been done with lemmy and the way it’s being done with lemmy isn’t “the right way”.

                Right, it’s definitely not an easy fix and Lemmy doesn’t even operate the way other sites do but today I’m learning that using these instances seems to be easily exploitable.

                The reason I mentioned region banning is because it definitely worked. There weren’t people uploading 10000 images of CSA cause if you tried to, you’d get banned so hard that you’d ruin it for other people posting near by.

                I was responding to the idea of gating csam content via geoip as “yikes” because I can’t find myself personally allowing CSAM in some countries, because it’s “legal” in those countries

                I agree. Honestly, if I was in charge in anyway - those countries just wouldn’t be allowed access. And that does happen. I use to work for an app where we had people working in the Philippines who couldn’t access the app itself. We had to just give them info and they would feed it to the customers. And it was because their country is blocked from viewing the app in the first place. They’re just straight up not allowed to use it there.

                Like I’m totally with you. Fuck MAPs, fuck all of em. If some archaic country still participates in something that is obviously harmful to people - yeah, impose these laws on them. Tell them to fuck off until they stop this shit.

                And lets be real. It’s gonna be years before they ever stop.

          • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Again, the technical issue isn’t on banning. Here’s the code to ban user at IP 1.2.3.4:

            How does an IP Ban work when this attack came through a different, legitimate, federated Lemmy server?

      • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think the comment above was trying to express dissatisfaction towards Lemmy’s hosts for failure to respond. They’re simply stating that the way things are all set up, much as we might like it, has serious problems - ones that may end up being considered unsolvable. As you said, we might be heading for an eventual plug pull.

        It’s like pointing out that cars produce fossil fuel exhaust. It sucks, and we’re seeing it as unsustainable, but there’s no convenient alternative yet.