Comment on [META] Overseas News - Proposal for increased enforcement of Rule 1
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days ago
I suspect most rule violations are probably committed out of ignorance, rather than malice. Most people probably don’t read the sidebar.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be useful to have a very simple filter. A bot that replies to every post, and asks the user to check if they’re following the rule.
Going a step further, the bot could tell the user to downvote the comment if it is following the rule, in which case the bot would delete its own comment. Anything where the OP did not downvote the bot’s comment within, say, an hour, gets removed by the bot. Its message could also (optionally) threaten banning the user if the violation is clear. No automated enforcement of that, but if a human reviews it and finds that not only did it break the rule, but it very obviously did and there’s no excuse for not knowing it, the human could then follow up with a ban.
Would there be any interest in something like that? Either the whole thing or just the first half? I’ve had a little experience developing Lemmy bots before and would be interested to try my hand at it.
An hour is a fairly short period of time. 24 hours is probably too long. Something in between those.
If people aren’t intetested in this but you want to try your hand at a bot, I think I could think of something on one of my communities. Maybe a weekly post of National air quality or something on AusEnviro or we could vote on c/rage for a gavourite aus music show that the bot could post each week. Or something else, just spitballin.
The bot would be immediately replying to a post a user has just made. I figure in that context, an hour should be more than enough time for the person who posted it to confirm that they’ve followed the rules.
eureka@aussie.zone 1 day ago
I’m interested, I haven’t seen Lemmy helper bots in action yet so I’m curious. Cloudflare might be a problem you’d need to negotiate with the admin.
As you suspect, and I agree, most rule breaking on this site will either be users who’ve skipped over the rules, or have forgotten them when posting quickly. So a simple, nonthreatening reminder should be adequate, without making good-faith users feel uncomfortable. I suggest something like “Thanks for posting. Please review the rules in our sidebar, and then downvote this reply to confirm, otherwise your post may be automatically deleted after an hour. Most importantly, make sure your post body includes an explanation of why this news is relevant to an Australian perspective - you can do this by editing your post if needed.” - it’s snappy, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who didn’t pay much attention.
I don’t know how necessary this bot will be, but we can make it low-risk of malfunctioning and use it as a low-stakes experiment that other comms can be inspired by, so if you’re itching for a project, then feel welcome!