For the love of god, when you report another user, describe the issue!

Yes, even if you've attached posts.
Yes, even if you think it's obvious.

And if you haven't reported any specific posts, and haven't described the issue, how do you expect us to do anything about it?

Also, keep in mind: if we suspend an account, their posts will be deleted after 30 days. Thanks to some genius at Mastodon gGmbH, they are not retained with the ticket for review purposes, not even links to the original posts. So if we later want to review why a certain account was suspended, that's a lot harder when the reporting user didn't send a description of the problem.

So for fuck's sake, use that text field! Please!

Trade offer:
We receive: description of your report
You receive: moderation

(This post represents the personal opinion of the author and is not an official statement, endorsed by, or representative of the collective opinion of the Eldritch Café moderation team.)

Concept: Mastodon feature that, whenever first contact from a new instance is made, automatically limits it if sign-ups are open and unrestricted.

I'd like to take a moment and welcome @liz as our new moderator here at #AllThingsTech

Please give her a follow and huge welcome to the team if you have a moment!

#AllThingsTech is currently looking for a moderator for our instance. Someone that can help with reports that come in, as well as various other little things.

If you are interested, please let myself or @beardedtechguy as we'd love to talk to you and possibly bring you on board.

Me in 2019: Let’s run an InfoSec and a regional Mastodon instance - Should be FUN!

Me today: Discussing whether reported accounts are russian troll bots and how far these election-influencing operations would go. “Do you really think they use a (virtual) iOS device, tunnel that to Hamburg, and then activate the Apple privacy network..?”

Good Luck to all the #mastomod and #mastoadmin !!!

There is a big fucking bug in Mastodon's moderation features.

When I as a moderator suspend a remote account...

Expected behavior: The account can no longer be found or interacted with on our server and the account can't find or interact with accounts on our server.

Actual behavior: the account can still be found but is empty. there is a notice that the account is suspended and there is even still a follow button - it just doesn't do anything.
And the account can still see everything from our instance and interact with our posts. Our users just won't reciprocate the interaction, because the reply won't appear here.
But if someone else replies to a reply from the suspended account we'll see that reply, but won't know what original post it belongs to.

Is this a new bug with Mastodon 4.3 or has it always been like that?
I've been moderating for 5 years now and this is new to me.

I'm not going to create an account on Microsoft Github to officially file this bug report, but can someone tell me if it's already reported and what's the status? Thanks.

Additional ideal expected behavior: Previous replies to any of our posts by the suspended account won't be seen by anyone anywhere on the Fediverse - or at least not as replies to our posts, because our instance notifies/federates all other instances that these replies shouldn't be there.

With the recent again-spamwave, I'm seriously considering writing a little tool for myself to bundle the following:

• suspend spam account
• limit instance
• send a message to the reporting user

It would only shave ~1 minute off of each report, but across hundreds of reports, that would save hours.

If you want to use a retractable block list for the current spam wave, use this script: https://mastodon.scot/@gunchleoc/111974599296575736

I'll provide the configuration in follow-up posts

IFTAS is hosting a list for the current spam wave: https://mastodon.iftas.org/@iftas/113273669404917189

And Seirdy has instructions for *oma instances: https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/a98a016a-0378-4620-bcf5-e0e6632a48f7

What Mastodon needs: better moderation tools

What Mastodon gets: new icons and confusing UI changes in the moderation tools

sigh.....

Im Fediverse treibt seit einigen Wochen ein Nazi sein Unwesen, der immer wieder auf verschiedenen Mastodon-Instanzen Accounts anlegt, um einen bestimmten Wissenschaftler mit Hassnachrichten zu überziehen.

Mods, Admins und andere Fediwesen reagieren hierauf teils gar nicht, teils hilflos. Das muss sich ändern! Darum ein paar Hinweise:

• User: Meldet Hassnachrichten *mit Weiterleitung an die ursprüngliche Instanz*! Ihr müsst keine Angst haben: Die Admins und Mods der anderen Instanzen sehen nicht, von wem die Meldung kommt, sondern nur, von welcher Instanz.

• Moderator:innen: Auch wenn ihr meint, dass ein Tröt von der Meinungsfreiheit gedeckt ist – seht euch auch den Kontext an! Wenn der Tröt Teil einer Hetzkampagne ist, solltet ihr evt. doch dagegen vorgehen.

• Admins: Instanzen, die nicht gegen Hass oder andere kriminelle Inhalte vorgehen, könnt ihr stummschalten oder deföderieren. Um eure User vor Belästigung zu schützen, hilft oft schon das Stummschalten (Limitieren).

#mastoadmin #mastomod #FediMods /c

In der Juni-Ausgabe meiner @gnulinux -Kolumne "Ückück und das #Fediverse" geht es dieses Mal um das Thema private Nachrichten, was wir als Mods und Admins wirklich sehen und warum ihr für eure Chats immer verschlüsselte Messenger verwenden solltet.

Den Artikel zum Nachlesen und -hören gibt es hier:

https://gnulinux.ch/wie-privat-ist-deine-nachricht

Question: a desktop software that queries the public Mastodon API to provide an overview of an instance (about page, rules, admin account, user count, moderated instances) – would that have any scraping / block circumventing concerns?

This would be without access token and such, so authorised fetch, disallow public API access, etc. would prevent fetching any information. And all of this is publicly available information that can be queried from /api/v1/instance without requiring authorization (by default). Basically, nothing you couldn't find by going to instance.example/about.

Any privacy/block concerns I'm missing?

We're looking for more ways to get people involved in our Communities.

Alongside our pilot volunteer Community Curation project, we've launched Community 'About Screens'. Here, you can see more about the Community, including who shapes it.

At the moment, all About Screens are a blank canvas but if you're interested in changing that, get in touch at volunteer@newsmast.org.

Please boost