that’s a great way to say piefed.social does that as well

you linked to a shady domain that lots of bots linked to in the past

since this post wasn’t to a LW community the removal didn’t federate. to see the full picture of our automod actions you have to look at the modlog at the source instance.

the post you created that was removed here was linking to a domain that has been massively spammed by bots in the past, which is why it’s in our automod blacklist.

as others already pointed out, you’ve been unbanned already when we saw the automod notification. you can also find contact in our instance sidebar:

i don’t have any evidence whether this domain has been spammed on behalf of the website owners, or whether this was a third party trying to frame them, but since there were no or almost no legitimate links to this domain before the spam bots i’m inclined to believe that this is a very shady website that should be avoided in any case.

unfortunately it’s still not finished, but we have an update here now: https://lemmy.world/post/36621226

i tend to be too optimistic on the timelines in which we get things done, especially when they are moderation related. we have just published an official update on the current situation: https://lemmy.world/post/36621226

should we just purge all mods of LW communities because someone says so? we don’t arbitrarily remove mods without a proper review. it’s not the action of removing someone that requires time but the review whether it should be done.

jordan has been removed from our community team several days ago and we’re still reviewing further stuff to determine additional actions to take.

there is no clear date to put on this other than my previous comment about it taking several days, as this is all shitty work that takes time and is not something that anyone is looking forward to do. it’s obviously our responsibility to review an act in situations like this, but there is only so much time available from volunteers. i’m hoping that we can finalize it this weekend, as weekends tend to be when people have more time available.

there have been multiple voices within our team, as well as from Ruud, to simply strip his moderator permissions from all communities, but this is not something aligning with our rules, especially as this specific part was established after the c/vegan drama some time ago. there are multiple reasons justifying removal of moderators from LW communities, but if we apply them we need to ensure that we have proper justification for that, for every affected community, which is the main thing that is currently still being worked on. i expect that we will find valid justifications for at least some communities, but we need to do this before the removal.

the actions taken so far were primarily relating to his behavior while being a member of our team, not due to his behavior as a community moderator or regular user, as we intend to hold our team to higher standards than regular users or moderators, making this a lot easier to justify.

the only reason comments would disappear without modlog entry would be a community or instance ban with the remove content checkbox selected. the only other option would be purging content, which is only available to people with the admin tag and we don’t use this anyway. it would also leave purge modlog entries. the lack of modlog entries not existing for community bans is a lemmy issue, not specific to LW.

you can find your community bans here: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&userId=239118

it’s not as much about the removal of those comments being the issue in and of itself for us currently, but that this is being done by a person in his position. we haven’t really been enforcing any special rules for moderator behavior on LW in the past (hence also currently considering a mod CoC), but having a member of our team incorrectly accusing people of lying and spreading misinformation on their own, even after seeing arguments for why he’s in the wrong is very much a step too far. i wasn’t directly involved in the discussion back then, so i don’t know the entire message history, but it was my understanding that he would at least stop with those claims, if he wasn’t able to apologize for it.

there were several recent reports, including private ones. also, just because you may not see something, it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. we have already discussed topics like the Canadian politics one with him in the past, as we also don’t consider it acceptable what he did back then.

we have started looking into reports about jordan a few days ago, and we have already identified several occasions where he has been acting in ways that we don’t consider to be acceptable for a member of our community team. it may still take us a few more days to come to final conclusions for how we will proceed with this, as this is something that needs time for a proper review and discussions within the team. we all have lives outside of lemmy, where we need and want to spend our time, and something like this takes hours to properly review.

one of the things we have already discussed will be establishing an internal CoC for community team members and people higher up in the team, which includes ensuring that we keep a certain level of professionalism in our interactions, even if another party doesn’t. we’re obviously all humans, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have responsibility for our actions, especially if it’s not a one-off thing. we will also consider if this may be something to establish for community moderators in general, but for now our primary focus is on people in positions above a regular user or moderator.

the implementation that piefed used to use made it trivial to link them to the original users, yes. this was an implementation flaw that could easily be addressed, which would make it less trivial to do so, mostly turning it into a probability assessment when correlating with other activity, provided that the pseudonymous identity is permanently tied to the real user.

that seems like a really good idea. I’ve had a discussion with someone we temporarily banned for upvoting their own content where they likely resorted to blocking their alt other account to prevent themselves from doing this. depending on the implementation, it could even be something like auto-detecting all the accounts you use and just warning you when voting to confirm you want to upvote content by another of your accounts, with a setting to disable these prompts or exclude certain accounts from it.

reports currently go to community instance and the instance of the user that was reported, other than that there is no federation on the lemmy side currently.

that’s because SJW is still on 0.19.11. 0.19.12 fixes this by forcing new posts in NSFW communities to be NSFW. see #5649. the UI change made it in 0.19.11 already but the backend change was broken and not backported.

it’s in the main settings area:

check if your piefed account has pms from other instances enabled. afaik piefed.social had this disabled by default for some time during the nicole spamwave.

fyi also @[email protected]

seems to work for me

essentially start by identifying the accounts posting links to the domain in question, then analyze the voting behavior of the accounts upvoting these posts. you can start by sorting out accounts that have legitimate activity and then narrow it down further and find common patterns that only apply to these accounts.

most of them were also created in similar time frames.

edit:

to extend on this, once you have something to go on with it’s fairly easy. the hard part is finding something that applies in a more generic way to identify this happening before someone else discovers unusual voting patterns and reports them.

thanks for flagging this, i just banned 346 accounts involved in this scheme from lemmy.world :|

(unbanned at the time of creating the report) accounts posting links to the same domain:

• 4x sh.itjust.works
• 2x ani.social
• 1x thelemmy.club
• 1x lemmy.ca

accounts i’m highly confident were involved in vote manipulation here:

• 172x sh.itjust.works
• 22x ttrpg.network
• 21x lemmings.world
• 20x discuss.online (banned by me)
• 19x lemmy.wtf
• 18x lemmy.myserv.one
• 18x leminal.space
• 18x ani.social
• 16x endlesstalk.org
• 7x lemmy.ca
• 4x lemy.lol
• 1x toast.ooo
• 1x startrek.website
• 1x lemm.ee