Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word “bot”. Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin’s reported agent of “kbinBot”.
The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.
Edit:
Here are all the links that I’ve found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)
Umm what?
I remember people doing tests and other variations of words featuring “bot” went through no problem, even changing the spelling of KBin was enough to get in.
I’m gonna have to call BS on their excuse.
That assumes they were using an expression based filter in the webserver config itself. If they were extracting user agent strings containing the word “bot” from their webserver logs and adding them to a static list of user agents to deny (particularly if it’s an external file referenced by the config that strings can be easily dumped into), it’s a plausible explanation. I can especially see this happening if they did a blind sort by log volume and only inserted the 20 biggest results or somesuch.
Even if this was the case, was someone in a position to observe that one of those strings contained “kbin”? Yes. Was it possible they still didn’t notice? Yes, especially if shell pipelines are involved. Was it possible for someone to notice but assume that this wasn’t the kbin software itself, but a third-party tool that someone else wrote? Also yes. Still possible that all of this is bullshit? Still yes!
Full disclosure: I’ve worked in the webserver and webapp adjacent spaces for a long time, and I have a lot of appreciation for how much damage one person’s stupid change without peer review can do in massive production environments. :) I am admittedly biased toward applying Hanlon’s razor in these situations.
If they were doing that, others with bot in the name would have been caught, no?
Yet the people who tested it said that wasn’t the case.
Reeks of competency if you do a blanket ban on that term, as if malicious bots would announce themselves as such.
@blightbow Thanks. I appreciate the work that the admins here do. Kbin-social is a nice landing pad for this reddit refugee. That said, I don’t have an interest in posting to lemmy.ml because they seem to be a bunch of tankies, which is being generous. The question in my mind is why kbin-social hasn’t returned the favor and banned them as well as their gulag archipelago instance?
Return the favor and…not ban them? Because this thread is explaining that it was a bug and has been fixed, meaning no shadowban is occurring anymore…
You’re thinking of lemmygrad.ml
Lemmy.ml is pretty diverse as far as I’m aware.
Browsing any Lemmy instance is like swimming in a public pool and saying only the other half of it is filled with piss and this part is fine…
Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml are both run by the same developers and occupied by the same users: tankies and people who are pro CCP apologists.
PSA: All public swimming pools are filled with piss.
It used to be filled with stingrays and Aids, so piss is tad bit better
Pretty much this. It still gets a lot of flack for being operated by the developers of Lemmy, but there are a large number of users and communities that exist on lemmy.ml for no other reason than it being one of the larger original instances. Most operators of high-volume instances are unlikely to take action against lemmy.ml unless a situation develops that gives them no other choice.
Doesn’t the .ml stand for marx and lenin?
That’s the rumour.
It’s technically the domain for Malawi, who operate a free domain name scheme.
But apparently those devs picked it because of Marx Lenin.
Thank you for this! I’ve been wondering what it was but didn’t care enough to look it up.
Those are the same people.
I think you all conflate the admins with the userbase. Lemmy.ml has a lot of regular users & communities. In that sense you would have to blanket block all Lemmy instances in general.
A community and its direction is though largely depending on the Admins.
Just recently some tankie posted a “meme” on “meme” that just casually tried to claim the Rothschild Family was intertwined with western media and because of that western media bad, just the casual antisemitism. And the Admins did not care.
I too tried to flee reddit for lemmy.ml, over a year ago now - and found it to be a far worse clusterfucked shitstorm than reddit ever was, and I mean that ideologically, philosophically, politically, and morally.
I just didn’t go back until the current exodus, mainly because I was trying to see if the account still worked, and it had been lost/purged/banned whatever
fuck those guys and the horse they rode in on, then far as I’m concerned, they can ride it back out of here wet.
Might as well federate with facebook.
Took way too long to get this addressed. But thanks you for solving this issue. There were the strangest stories going around on why kbin was blocked.
Kinda crazy that the lemmy admins only heard about it 12 hours ago. This situation went on for many days.
