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lemmy.ml is no longer shadowbanning kbin. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by blightbow@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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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)

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[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] blightbow@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

Like I said, a blind sort by volume of the top n user agents in their logs containing the word bot would be enough to do it. Drop the output of that sort into a text file or a hash table, then create a user agent filter in the nginx config that blocks the specific strings seen in that file.

It is very much the sort of thing that a single admin can do by accident, and the exact sort of problem I would expect to see with rapidly growing instances operated by a very small number of tech enthusiasts.

[–] Teppic@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

From the response it is likely that many other specifically identified phrases which do contain the word 'bot' have indeed been blocked (presumably still are).

The slight variations in kbinBot which were subsequently tried wouldn't previously have shown up in the logs and so wouldn't have been added to the blacklist.