I have been away from home for a long time now and do not have all accesses. I will try to restore access in the coming days. The care of the instance will also be handed over.

I figured this might be useful to some of you wondering about his lack of activity, the reason for the site's frequent issues, and the future of kbin.social.

It would just be nice to know what the heck happened.

It would just be nice to know what the heck happened.

I keep getting the 50x Error when trying to use it.

The Unofficial Kbin Guide has been decommissioned and the Unofficial Kbin Guide magazine has been deleted.

Thanks to everyone who supported it.

KES is the Kbin Enhancement Suite, a userscript/extension for (k/m)bin that provides a variety of customizable tools for users.

The last minor version included an initial attempt at a spam filter. This was chiefly done to address the low-hanging fruit of spam and scrub the most persistent pharma ads, etc. The approach was similar to that used by Ublock Origin or Steven Black's hosts file, in that it was a monolithic list of filter rules.

This was alright as a stopgap measure, but to the surprise of no one, the types of spam that continued to appear were innumerable in variety.

In an effort to have some filtering rather than none, the feature also went against the KES dictum about giving users choice to tweak their own settings: it was an all-or-nothing filter.

This update introduces v2 of spam filtering. The old logic has been retired, but may make a comeback at some point. A new sidebar page titled "Spam" has been added, and this will be a central place for anti-spam features.

The first of these efforts is a new filter that exposes the following options:

• Hide posts from very new accounts

Users commented that there is no "gating" mechanism with registration, causing bogus accounts to be constantly recreated as a form of ban evasion. If you find that very new accounts have a high tendency to be spam, you can tick this setting to remove posts from very new users from the feed.

This does not block the user outright, merely hiding the post. This effectively gives some "break-in" time for the user to prove themselves. After a certain threshold, the user will fall outside of the "new account" window; if they continue to engage in spam-like behavior at that time, they should be caught by the other ban filters below.

• Hide posts with abnormally low relative rank

Users with aggregate posting activity that does not necessarily resemble spam at first glance, but which periodically post spam/off-topic/controversial threads in the wrong communities, have a high likelihood of being astroturfers. This option hides such posts from the feed if the relative vote weight is egregiously outside the norm. Like the above, it does not block them outright.

• Block users with spam-like activity

This feature blocks users outright if they engage in spam, mass posting, and other robotic behavior. It is less permissive than v1 of the spam filters, which failed to catch a lot of spam that was not explicitly blacklisted in the filter list. This new approach is more generic and does not need constant updating of the spam filters.

By default, all three options are enabled. I find this combination gives the best results so far. Note that infinite scrolling should be enabled for best results, and it may take a little while when navigating to a magazine for the results to be filtered.

Give it a try and see if this negates the spam issue or improves your experience. What other filter options would you like to see added?

The remainder of the changelog follows:

Add-ons

Filter advertisements (@shazbot)

Location: Spam > Filter advertisements

Updated filtering logic to v2, as described in the preamble of this post.

Collapse pinned posts (@shazbot)

Location: Threads > Collapse pinned posts

This simple feature groups together pinned posts on the magazine index and collapses them by default. Click the toggle area at the top of the magazine index to expand pinned posts. This is especially useful on magazines with many pinned posts that are not regularly archived, such as /m/kbinmeta.

API

Added the helper function isThread() to the API. This returns true if the current window location is a thread inside of a magazine. This can be used to abort if the feature is intended to only apply on the thread index. In the future, a more expanded function will be provided that returns the type of page from a list of enums.

I just realized that some features like "Collections" are not available in other Kbin instances nor in Mbin when in theory they all use 0.10.1.
Is the source outdated?

Hi all. I have decided to shut down the unofficial kbin guide magazine (https://kbin.social/m/unofficial_kbin_guide) as well as shut down the unofficial docs page: https://unofficial-kbin-guide.surge.sh/.

I will leave things up until the end of the month, then I will shut them down completely. Thanks!

Hi all. I have decided to shut down the unofficial kbin guide magazine (https://kbin.social/m/unofficial_kbin_guide) as well as shut down the unofficial docs page: https://unofficial-kbin-guide.surge.sh/.

I will leave things up until the end of the month, then I will shut them down completely. Thanks!

Does anyone else get Secure Connection failed errors when connecting to kbin.run?``

Trying to look for random profiles from https://nijimiss.moe/explore on https://kbin.social/search, and Kbin Social throws an error 50x every time.

From what could gather, Nijimiss is a federated platform, so maybe there's an issue with the integration with it, if there's any?

Or perhaps one of the two defederated from the other? If that's the case, then I couldn't find anything about it.

Also dunno if it's relevant, but both without a VPN, being in Brazil, and with a VPN set to Japan, I can access the Nijimiss site, but apparently can't access when the VPN is set to European countries, having tried Norway, Spain, Portugal, Poland and lastly Albania to test if it wasn't an issue with EU countries specifically, no dice in any from Europe.

A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars.

Now don't get me wrong, I love it when m/infosec advertises voodoo curses and revenge spells, but after the first time the joke wears thin, you know?

3 or 4 spam "Buy Phloboxidril Now In Your Area" posts per day were tolerable. 20 to 50 aren't. I know I could block the magazine, but I'm just one of the many who are subjected to it.

E2a: a day later I blocked science, only to find that askKbin also suffers from this spam

The blurb below is excerpted verbatim from the release notes. For the full release notes, see here.

Repository: KES

Many of you are aware of the "canned meat" problem on kbin.social, with some magazines being inundanted with garbage posts.

The latest version of KES ships with an experimental new feature you can enable that attemps to filter these posts and block the users who posted them based on certain heuristics.

This feature is experimental, but I see a lot of users voicing frustration at the problem, so now seems like a good time to start collecting feedback. You can start using this feature immediately and it should not have any adverse effects, but its coverage is still being expanded.

You can find it under General > Filter advertisements. For best results, it should be used in conjunction with infinite scrolling enabled in the kbin sidebar, so that new content is loaded in as posts are removed.

As you navigate through a magazine, KES will remove offending posts from the index and then permanently block the user of the post. This feature is also preventive, as variations of posts made under different usernames will continue to be flagged. The goal is to avoid the tedious process of "whack-a-mole" and cull these posts without manual intervention.

Initially, KES will be removing posts from the index, but as it builds your blocklist up for you, such posts will stop appearing in the thread index altogether, and you should see the overall signal to noise ratio improving. Outside of your blocklist, subsequent posts that meet certain criteria will continue to be culled regardless or when or where they appear.

I am currently using /m/science and /m/opensource as a control. If you navigate to those magazines and compare the results before and after enabling this feature, the difference should be clear. After enabling the feature and scrolling all the way back to 2023, there should be few if any unsolicited ads on the page.

Hopefully this improves readability and encourages participation in communities that otherwise seemed impenetrable at first glance. In fact, once you scrub the garbage posts, you'll be surprised to find that there are legitimate posts being made fairly frequently in these seemingly "dead" communities--the posts were just buried in the heap.

However, canned meat comes in a lot of different flavors, and each magazine has slightly different permutations. The coverage in this initial version is not exhaustive, but it attempts to be thorough. This should greatly cut down on the most annoying ads. If there are specific (most likely unmoderated) magazines you are still having a problem with, please leave a comment listing the magazine. You don't need to point to specific posts or users; the magazine name is enough here for me to analyze what kinds of posts are appearing.

Some additional notes:

• For the time being, this feature does not report the post to the magazine's moderator (usually nonexistent). By kbin's design, a post can only be reported at most by a single user, so this seemed like a reduplication of efforts to me. But auto-report can be added if necessary.
• This feature works on any instance, but is chiefly designed for kbin.social and is probably unnecessary elsewhere.
• I have not taken a look at microblogs yet, so I don't know if this problem is happening there, too (please let me know). For now, this works on the thread index of magazines.
• For best results (if you want to quickly bootstrap your blocklist), I suggest enabling the feature and scrolling through an affected magazine for awhile with infinite scroll on to build up the blocklist as new posts load in, then refreshing the page if necessary.
• The "random threads" sidebar is fundamentally flawed because it shows content even if you've already blocked it. So I recommend enabling General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads in conjunction with this feature.

This post doesn't directly affect kbin.social users, but it is relevant. It discusses some of the potential pros/cons of Kbin and the pros/cons of Mbin, and also the direction the kbin.earth server is heading.

Banning spam accounts on kbin.social is a cumbersome affair.

E.g., today @bayaz tried to ban several spam accounts. But that just did not quite work:

Instead of straight forward banning the accounts responsible for spam, those accs got unbanned.

How come?

If magazine owners ban a spam acc which prior went unreported, the ban button triggers an unban command.

To effectively ban accounts, they must be reported first. Approving the report will trigger a ban. I.e. magazine owners must report the account identified as spam to themselves to enforce a ban.

Therefore, pre-emptive banning of spam accounts does not work on kbin.social.

This is a serious problem which needs to be addressed asap.

cross-posted from: https://swg-empire.de/post/825076

Migrate Lemmy server to mbin

I'm thinking of migrating my Lemmy-Server over to Mbin so that I can follow Mastodon users as well. I know that there are tools to export/import the community and magazine subscriptions. But what about all my posts and comments?

I don't have any communities on my server and I guess the posts and comments I made should live on in the other Lemmy servers. But it would be really nice to be able to navigate back to them and/or receive notifications about replies to old content.

Has anyone ever done something along those lines? Maybe even just with a dirty SQL script?

And I would like to keep all my pictrs uploads in some way. Though I guess this should be easier to figure out with some bash scripting.

Is anyone else? One of the reasons I was interested in /kbin over other options was this feature, but I don't remember seeing them on subscribed or all. Is this new? I'm kind of intimidated by it but ultimately know I want to interact. I'm seeing some cool stuff! It's all on magazines I have subscribed to.

Is there any way we, as users, can help deal with the waves of spam-meds-bots? When I get the chance I downvote, but that's not possible for microblog. Do reporting them have any effect, or they go in the pile and are more a nuisance than a help?
If we blocked the culprit users, would it do anything other than us personally, even by just reducing their visibility?

We'll still get their content but be unable to interact.

@piotrsikora @ernest FYI: lemmy.world is blocking us

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/955988/Temporarily-blocking-activities-from-kbin-social

I made a comment there yesterday trying to get your attention on this, but not sure if the @ on that post actually went through properly or not, so I'm trying again.

#kbinMeta

I can only get my subscriptions and not the all feed. I feel like maybe I am only getting kbin content.

KES is the Kbin Enhancement Suite.

This is just an update to note that the tool has undergone a total quality audit to ensure that all of its add-ons support both kbin and mbin instances and behave in an expected fashion regardless of which instance type you are using.

If you had previously tried KES on an mbin-type instance and encountered anomalous behavior, you should now find that it has full compatibility.

The full release notes can be found here

Feeling thwarted by the 404, I suddenly remembered there are plenty of curated feeds over in Collections for us to browse. Have updated one of mine to reflect newer communities.