Hello! I’m setting up a kbin instance, and while it’s a little hard to tell thanks to the 0.19 breakage, it seems to be interoperating to some degree with most of the fediverse. I can post messages back and forth, at least.
With lemmy.world, though, it’s not working. I get messages like this in the log:
Get fail: https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819, https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 Bots Temporarily Blocked
And, indeed, it seems like lemmy.world is configured to reject connections from user-agents containing the word “bot”:
$ wget -nv --user-agent="kbinBot/0.1 (+https://my.domain/bot)" https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819: 2024-01-07 05:25:43 ERROR 412: Precondition Failed. $ wget -nv --user-agent="kbinAgent/0.1 (+https://my.domain/agent)" https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 2024-01-07 05:25:56 URL:https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 [264000] -> "6458819.2" [1] $ wget -nv https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 2024-01-07 05:26:06 URL:https://lemmy.world/comment/6458819 [264006] -> "6458819.3" [1]
While I can understand that many bots are harmful so this is probably a necessary measure, it seems to me like this should break federation with all kbin instances (unless they figure out to change their user agent). No? Would it maybe be a good idea to add an exception to this for kbinBot? I may have misunderstood something, as I’m new to all this, just saying how it looks to me poking at it briefly.
Also, is it okay if I change my user-agent so that it doesn’t contain the forbidden word? Presumably there’s no administrative reason kbin and lemmy.world shouldn’t talk.
jelloeater85@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We are temp blocking most bot traffic for now, due to it causing a lot of slowness on LW. Please don’t change your user agent string to get around it, that would be very bad.
We can turn it back on and see if things still slow to a crawl again.
It’s nothing personal, just trying to look out for the human users on the site.
Any questions feel free to DM me.
mo_ztt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You saw that this isn’t a “bot” in the normal sense of the word, but just a kbin instance doing federation, right?
I mean I’m fine with however you want to limit access; I’ll leave it as “kbinBot” so it’ll get blocked, if that’s really what you want, but completely preventing a kbin instance from federating with lemmy.world because of how the user-agent looks seems like maybe not the right thing to do. (Assuming that’s what’s going on – kbin.social identifies itself as kbinBot also, and its posts seem like they’re going through, so maybe I’m just misunderstanding something about the situation.)
Rooki@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We say “Bot” to everything not user/frontend interaction. It was just in the last time very much. Almost up to 2.7 million. If we didnt knew it was “just the federation” we thought we would get ddosed. After we actived the “Bot” blocking it went under 500 active connections per hour.
jelloeater85@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hey, I added a exception for kbin and mbin bots, so you should be good now. It was never meant to be a permanent block, just technical testing. Also I did specifically allow kbin.social as well a few days ago, so they should have been fine.
Please let me know if you have any technical issues going forward 💗
-Jelloeater