Fediverse

It's the last 30 days of comments. That's long enough to be robust, but short enough that someone can realistically rehabilitate their image with the bot by not being a jerk for 30 days, and restore their posting ability.

I was hoping that it would be a good tool for self-reflection and fairness in moderation. In practice, the people who get banned for being jerks are totally uninterested in revising their commenting strategy, and choose instead just to yell at me that I'm awful and my bot is unfair and it should be their right to come in and be a jerk if they want to, and banning them means I am breaking Lemmy. Then they restart one of the arguments that got them banned in the first place. I don't know what I was thinking, expecting anything different, but that's what happened. You can see some of it happening in these comments.

New accounts, or accounts that have been recently inactive, are a hard problem. I think I've got it mostly worked out now. If the bot has limited information, it won't ban you, but it will be super-strict if you have a generally negative reception, and if its unclear impression of you is negative and you also make a comment that gets downvoted, it'll delete the comment. I think it should work fairly well, but it's still in development. It's hard to test, because that situation only comes up a few times a month, so I basically just have to wait a while every time I do it.

You can check a user by searching the modlog for their user, and [email protected] as the moderator, and see what comes up. If you see that they've been banned at any point, then they are probably a reprobate of one sort or another.