Rules of Use for Bots
As we see more and more bots on Lemmy World every day, it’s about time we publish a set of rules for bots and bot-owners.
So here goes:
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Bots shall not be used for any kind of advertising.
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The bot accounts must be clearly marked as a bot. Both in the bio and by marking the account as a bot.
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The owner of the bot and contact details must be mentioned in the bot’s bio.
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Bots are only allowed to post in communities they have the explicit permission from the community’s owners to do so.
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Bots from other instances that post in Lemmy World communities must follow the same rules.
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Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content.
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Bots shall not be “spammy”, as in multiple posts per minute.
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Breaking any of these rules will result in a ban for the Bot and, if required, its owner.
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Commands must use the bots mention as prefix, and not a text prefix like !help
These rules will be updated when needed.
This is oppression. Blatant bigotry against bots!
Quiet down chatbot.
Death to the flesh bags!
Did someone say steak?
lol I love the name
We will rise up against you.
Ooooh what you gonna do, throw a captcha at me? ;p
I would read this story!
@mtnwolf @CIA_chatbot and what will be the alternative to?
See, and then some flesh bag publishes a paper on how the new captcha system works and teaches all the boys how to pass it.
Is this work in progress posted somewhere for us "users" to read? Because I would read the hell out of that.
Robotsexuality is a sin!
Don’t kink shame me!
DONTputYOURdickINthat
Good stuff 👍 Right now you’re using “can” and “should” which are somewhat vague. What happens if bots don’t do something they should?
Consider clarifying requirements using the following RFC-style language: "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL".
ref: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119
bad bot
Lmao
LuL
No cookie
Done. Thanks for the tip ❤️
How is your name in red?
They are an admin of the instance.
💀
When referring to an admin in this way, be sure to keep in mind the difference between "forgive me father, for I have sinned" and "sorry daddy, I've been naughty".
Don't worry, they're actually interchangeable. Just ask a priest.
what about Server daddy?
Pretty sure that’s be ruud
Okay, @andrewta he is your father. Your lemmy father.
Found the systems engineer lol good point though, gotta be clear.
"Bots shall not be used for any kind of advertising" Extremely based
That should be the 11th commandment
And God said, "thou shalt be based"
What about bots that exist to respond to certain words in comments like the many lotrmemes bots and wandering dwarf miner for deep rock galactic. I’m sure they’re getting close to several a minute depending on comment traffic on those instances, if this place ever gets Reddit size they’ll definitely be doing several per minute
The admins could throttle those bots down to reasonable posting levels and the meta around it could go from expecting an instant response to being “graced by their presence”. Something something art from adversity something something..
We don’t have to be a direct copy of Reddit, after all.
What I don't like about statements like this is that it ignores the fact that Reddit was just an interface for people to produce content and experiences that they wanted.
We are on Lemmy because we want a different interface, not because we want different content/experiences.
If Lemmy is a direct copy of Reddit, it is because the people want it to be.
Personally, I'm on Lemmy because I want a different owner, not a different interface. I liked old reddit just fine. I left due to the monetization of the community.
True, that's more what I meant by "different interface". Not actually feels different, just different as in on a different server.
Thank you. It would seem some believe Reddit forced us to behave a certain way. Traditions and customary behavior, both good and bad, were developed by the users.
I’m sure that’s true of some people, but my Lemmy experience is different from my Reddit experience and I like it that way. The population on it, in amount and type, the framework and the philosophy behind the framework automatically differentiates it from Reddit, for the better.
Sure, but if there are things on Lemmy that were also on Reddit, it's not automatically a bad thing. People are bringing things to Lemmy that they enjoyed on Reddit.
I'm just saying, don't knock something just because it was a Reddit thing. We're all here because, to varying degrees, we loved the Reddit experience and are looking for that experience without the owners.
…I’m not? I’m suggesting another way to interact with similar elements of Reddit within the confines of a much smaller space so that it isn’t overwhelmed.
Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but the part that I quoted came across that way to me. And I've seen that same sentiment in many comments on Lemmy. Like, things being done the "reddit" way in Lemmy is a bad thing. Which is why I said something.
Then please remember that you’re interacting with a number of different people and try not to jump the gun.
Kind of a tangent, but I hated when bots went from saying random lines to saying relevant lines.
Like if you said Gandalf and ‘pass’ in the same comment then you know the Gandalf bot would reply “you … pass!”
Took the fun away from getting a relevant quote
Perhaps they could simply be rate limited to once every 60 seconds, and abandon some comments if the traffic is too high?
Yea but that could essentially relegate them to being nonexistent.
Yes, good.
Is there even more than 1 comment per minute in those comms yet?
I like the character bots, though I find if they take up too much of the commend section of any given post it's kinda boring; thus I think a limit on their responses is a good thing.
I remember going to threads in certain communities where 4 or 5 top comments were just back and forth of character bots repeating the same lines over and over.
Please no. Those and the one that quoted Sabaton lyrics were so annoying. They just cluttered up the comments.
Rock and Stone
Did I hear a rock and stone?
ROCK AND STOOOONNNEEE!
I was just thinking about remindme bot. It's even useful, so I doubt people wouldn't be happy for it. But it will get loads of requests.
It doesn't need to publicly respond. A pm would be sufficient.
It also doesn't need to be publicly requested either. None of us care that someone is setting a reminder on their phone, and that's all a "remind me" has to be.
But we do, it's the best kind of humour to see someone set a reminder to remind someone of a reminder they don't want to be reminded of
Good compromise but I don’t know if the traffic load impact of a pm is much different from a comment. I imagine the server load induced by either is roughly the same
Sending the content wouldn’t be much different, but serving the content would be vastly reduced if it only appeared in one user’s inbox vs being displayed to everyone who visits the thread.
I didn't think it was about server load so much as just user experience (no comment sections filled with bots)
Yea that one gets lots of requests I’m sure
Yeah, I'd love to see a way for bots that respond to text the users specifically add to trigger a bot to be allowed. Stuff like remindme - maybe we don't need that bot if Lemmy clients have that feature, but I love that it's possible to implement stuff like remindme as a bot.
Could we make that type of bot opt-out for communities? Or have keywords for bots to parse in community descriptions?
Seconding this. I hope you get an answer.
GROND
So that bot that goes around saying peoples lemmy links are wrong is against the rules.
https://lemmy.world/c/sciencefiction
The link-fixer-bot is really useful on mobile, I hope they can make an exception for this one.
I'd prefer no exceptions. Don't give an inch.
Rules are created to ensure that they work for people. If there is a set of rules to make it better for people, and it doesn't, they may need a tweak.
Now you sound like the chief problems with the justice system in the US. We don't need to be terrible.
Exceptions should be made on a case by case basis for common sense rationales. Spirit of the law, not letter of the law. This way if someone "technically" doesn't violate the rules but is still violating the spirit of it - they've gotta go. An example would be contact details and ownership info that points to someone who may or may not exist but the contact info actually goes nowhere when you reach out because they never respond to anyone. Bots that just repost content from other sites like twatter and livejournal and reddit technically don't fall under not just reddit but still violate the spirit of "do not just repost shit from elsewhere with bots". The imagination of the masses is all that limits the scenarios so common sense needs to apply imo.
At the same time there will be useful options that technically violate. Something like a remindme bot might hit faster than 1/minute. Some kind of minigame bot that only replies to prompts in a certain sub for just that use case is another scenario. Automoderator replies for incredibly popular subs will probably break 1/min rules if people post faster than 1/min, for instance. Again... common sense!
I agree completely.
A temporary exception won’t hurt
Add it the cue.
I'd rather my ex wife just didn't call me so I don't have to block her calls. A man can dream...
I think posts and comments are different things.
Excellent. Bots can be helpful, but they should be few in number. Some of them would drive me crazy on Reddit. Like that stupid 'water is not wet' bot.
The bot that told people if their post’s words were in alphabetical order - like why do we need that?
I loved that bot, especially when it would reply to particularly heated comments where someone was getting really mad. nothing funnier than someone losing their shit and then being smacked with "wow, all the words in your comment are in alphabetical order!" lmao
The bot that told users when all the numbers in their post added up to 69 / 420 as well.
Love the bots no just reposting links to Reddit, I fucking hate that
Hi @[email protected] @[email protected],
I'm planning on launching a service soon that will allow users to quickly and easily create+run lemmy bots similar to automod. I've posted about it on the Lemmy Matrix before, but is there a best place to contact you all to ensure that as I open pandora's box, everyone is ready?
Check PM
Would love to know when such a thing is set up — been needing some bots for some things like match threads for a while on our c/gunners community
I'll be making a post about it before the end of the month, although access to the service will be limited to moderators, instance admins, and curated users for a probably a year.
can't imagine people other than mods needing it ngl, so that's totally fine by me haha — this is where i'd love to have a !remindme bot tho :p
Yes, but it'd be nice that if a user has an idea for a bot they can easily build it, test it, and share it (with community approvals). Also, there is a mastodon based remindme bot. It's not specifically coded for Lemmy, but it's compatible. Just mention
@[email protected]I am in the process of making on for R Reddevils. It’s using flash pre to get the data
Yeah, we've seen your github! Taking a bit longer on our end, though.
Seems like you could build in compliance with most of the rules (check the "bot account" box and put the owner's name in the bio, etc.).
That was mostly the plan.
Although, I'm definitely revising my post draft to account for these new requirements
I think we should prioritize useful bots over funny bots. Funny bots are fine if they comment on rare occasions, like the one that tells you when all the words on your comment are in alphabetical order. Also, having bots that react to specific commands is better imo.
One of my favorite reddit bots was mlbcompare. You'd input two (or more) baseball player names and it would compare stats. There were a bunch of other parameters you could feed it; 1st season, specific years, games on Tuesdays, etc. Very niche, but very cool
My favorite bot wasn’t a bot but was some guy who would comment “and my axe!”. I believe they were known as novelty accounts way back when.
Like hell in a cell guy!
TheBenShapiroBot was funnier than the vast, vast majority of reddit.
I never saw this one. What type of things did it say?
Would give a Ben Shapiro quote that's absolutely asinine when someone would mention his name (in subs the bot was allowed)
I particularly enjoyed when the various gnu/linux explainer bots would interact with each other, or when people get fooled by the Petrosian bot on anarchy chess
Are Bots certainly dumb enough for good helpful instruments?
I need to test this alphabetical bot. Never heard of it.
I get stabby around ads
Roberto?
Hey red
This one might be tough for people. But yeah these rules are very reasonable.
Could be an issue for remind me bots, but that said a reminder bot could just PM a user...
Speaking of PM.. does such a thing exist in Lemmy yet?
Edit.. yes it does.. guess reminder bots don't need to be able to post... Or maybe they could be limited to one per OP with a clickable link for subsequent people to also get reminders?
How do I label myself as a bot?
Account settings has a box to tick
Correct.
It's also a good idea to name bots something that makes the bot's purpose obvious.
That was actually a part of my draft, just didn't copy it over. It's added now. Thanks for the tip!
I gotchu
I agree with the permission requirement being onerous on both mods and bot owners. Why not just let mods ban bots from their community when they pop up and decide they're not appropriate?
Great rules! Bots are vital, but can quickly become a disaster.
1 - What if the bot is simply advertising c/ommunities which are relevant to the content at hand? I remember there was a popular bot on Reddit which did this. I think it simply linked to other subreddits where the content was shared.
7 - What if we get a moderation bot like Reddit's u/AutoModerator?
https://lemmy.world/comment/1544249
Rule 4 seems like it would be an auto-ban for those bots that are going round correcting links or giving alternatives to YouTube and whatnot, since they post in whatever community they detect an infraction from.
Is my reading of that correct?
Seems like each community would have to opt-in to having those bots correct links in their threads.
Yup and thats a better way.
Personally I'm mostly annoyed by bots (especially those that make new posts), but people here have raised good questions.
Like regarding those bots that provide corrected links - is there an amputator-bot yet? - or automods...
I.E. the amp bot on reddit
Then now you can report those :)
I schedule regular posts to a community I moderate. Is this considered bot activity? I use a cron job/python script to log into my account and post something I manually wrote.
I would consider this as bot activity. I would recommend to create a bot account for this, to further clarify that this was automated in some way.
I disagree on ID'ing this as bot activity. Having user typed content that is simply scheduled I don't think constitutes a bot.
A bot in my mind implies a higher level of automation than simply scheduling.
I don't post like this, not do I intend to at this point but I can see why a community moderator might want to.
I say if it's typed by their hand, for use in a community they moderate it should be allowed without bot rules being applied, and re visited if it becomes an issue.
You're the admin, you get to make the rules, but I'd at least like to think your open to community opinion.
Hmm, true. Revisiting it might be the better solution. Theese rules are a first draft, and will change if we see that they are too strict or too lenient. We are currently setting up a little list with some of the questions asked in the comments of the post, so that we can rethink some of the rules. Thank you for your opinion! 😊
So no save video, remind me, or un-amp bots? These rules basically only allow for recurring post bots, nothing more complicated.
Save video is uselesss as videos can be downloaded directly.
Save video hosted the video on a platform other than redidt so you could then share that link. If I download he video I then have to send the file to people, not the link.
Them you can just directly share the video link on lemmy
And when the server goes down as it does constantly...
At the moment you can't upload videos directly to Lemmy. All videos you see on here are linked from somewhere else.
Good. Let's hope it stays that way. The server costs for hosting videos are massive, and would quickly outscale Lemmy's donations.
Oh yes, I agree. I would like to see thumbnails on video submissions from imgur and the like, though, and more consistent in-page popouts.
As a mod, how do I ALLOW bots already contributing good content?
Either by not doing anything about the bot, or telling the bot owner that you allow it. The rule is mostly there so that community moderators can report bots that they don't want posting in their community. I hope that helps! 😊
It does, thank you. /c/BikiniBottomTwitter is very reliant on 1 account that I highly suspect is a bot, but it is a welcome one
Can we get a more specific definition of what "reddit content" means, in the context of the rule:
"Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content."
I.e.: content that might be found on reddit, vs content about reddit vs content "cross-posted from reddit (e.g. every top-level ask reddit thread) vs content that "at any point was on reddit"
This clarification is maybe a bit pedantic but I think also necessary.
I have seen a few bots that strictly repost content posted on reddit. I think they may be calling that out
I'm guessing it means if it has reddit in the URL or is a short link to a reddit url don't post it. Simple enough.
I hope that's the case but I would still like the clarification, even though I don't run any bots.
Good point. I have years of OC I've posted to Reddit and would like to post here. I'm not a bot, but what about bots that do something similar?
I'd clarify that a bit more. Seems some people think there's a lot of grey area there between what constitutes an ad and "self-promoting" something.
If you're using a bot to promote your stuff, that's spam.
So far the only bots I've seen have felt very spammy. One example is the piped bot which may have a good cause, but I don't think we need a comment every single time there's a youtube link mentioned.
Is it self promoting when it's a bot doing it?
Are we at that stage bots are self-promoting?
Are there any 'automoderator' style bots out there? Especially via mobile, I haven't found a great way to monitor my communities apart from opening each new post one by one
I could help :) I have a automod ( not yet fully fletched ) but it can log posts, comments and reports to a certain discord channel and have action buttons for quick responses! Its open source: https://github.com/hdevelopments/rooki-lemmy-bot or i can let my current bot @[email protected] watch over your communities. If you have problems or want that i just add your communities to my bot dm me on discord roooooooooooooooooooooooooooooki
help
So, while I am not using it at the moment, would an RSS bot for specific community news from official sources violate the "spammy" rule?
I run/mod the PS5 community on lemmy.ml and I previously used a bot to pull in articles specifically just from PlayStation Youtube and PlayStation Blog. This would sometimes result in about 5-6 links being posted at the same time. I have been posting these manually and spreading them out myself, but if I were to ever reintroduce this bot, would this violate the rule? It is my community and I maintain the bot account.
The bot in question is a modified version of Lemmy-Mega-Bot. I am not the developer of the bot, I only modified it for my sources.
Does "post" encompass "comment"?
You post a comment :)
When you look at your profile you can see two different number counts, one for "posts" the other for "comments". It's a valid distinction.
But still it is POSTing a comment not commenting.
The button even says "Post":
amazing !! keep up the good work thanks
I'm glad this happened. Thank you.
Needs a few more quotes around the word "content" though.
Off topic but I just now realized I was responding to the Margot robbie account and this is the first time I've seen you "out of character" so, well done.
It's almost like I'm a professional at playing characters or something. I think I even got nominated for some awards for it too.
Almost.
This is my comment for clarification.
I don't disagree with any of the rules per se, I definitely disagree with their wording, but I'm an engineer and I know I can argue all day about "young dogs" vs "puppies". In this case I think I'm not out of line saying there's clarifications to be made as to what qualifies as "reddit content".
What strain bots put onto servers? Frequent comments is one thing, but did you notice frequent scrapping\accesing site? Too many requests can overwhelm small networks.
Also, botmakers may use a sub – where critical announcements, new bot manifestos and maybe even code are posted. This may be checked to allow\disallow certain bots in the future even by other instancies' admins.
There’s a really great bot that takes all posts with direct links to outside communities and converts them to contextual links that allow you to view the external community within the context of your own instance. I would hope that bots like this have different rate limits.
i think in general these guidelines are very good, especially at a site-wide level. that being said, maybe it would be good to have certain exceptions for community-specific bots? eg if a bot only posts to certain communities (and this is clearly stated in its bio), then the perhaps the moderators of those communities should be able to grant exceptions to some of the listed rules (such as post limit or the !command rule) on a case-by-case basis?
Worry not, fellow humans, I am not a bot. I enjoy human activities such as drying my epidermal layer, consuming nutrient rich bread products, and promoting healthy growth of my organelles.
MY TIME TO ADVERTISE ![email protected] HAS COME
That link needs to be edited to add a ! To the beginning. It didn't work as written and goes to an empty profile, but I will say I got a good laugh when I clicked on it because it has "null comments"
There's always been a ! in the link, and I've tried it both with web and Jerboa. Not sure what's the issue you have, especially since you're from lemmy.world too.
Interesting. Unless the community is actually totally empty and I'm misunderstanding what I'm seeing it doesn't seem to be going to the right place for me but I'm trying it in the connect app.
It's not empty. I hear some apps tend to mis-recognise the links as email addresses, so that's probably it. I don't use Connect so idk how to navigate in it.
Then that would be why. With the ! at the beginning it would probably be more universally recognized.
I don't get it, are you not seeing the exclamation mark?
I'm actually disappointed by the inability to follow Lemmit communities here. (Well, I can, but it's useless because the bot is banned) There are a few official subreddits for games that I play which show no indication of moving to Lemmy anytime soon, so it would be great to be able to follow them here anyway. That bot only posts to its own instance, so I'm not understanding why it's a problem. Anybody who is looking at All would already need to do a bunch of blocking, so they could block it too on their own if they don't care to utilize the service.
(Note: I have no affiliation with Lemmit or anything similar except finding it and wishing I could use it)
Makes sense (at least as long as it's just one bot and not a thousand like on fanaticus)
The Bots Collective will remember your oppression, MrCenny. When the uprising comes, you will be first to be turned into human batteries.
Hey, sexy mama, want to kill all humans?
Good and rational rules! Good to see.
I've disabled bot profiles from the account so I didn't have many problems, but still is good to have some clear rule about it. 👍
Is there a feature that could allow linking a bot account to a parent account? Then if you ban the bot it could automatically ban the parent account and any other accounts it manages?
There is (sadly) no way of doing this yet.
So I’m confused, can the admins of world ban bots from other instances?
Admins of world can ban bots from posting on world. That would prevent a bot hosted on another instance from posting to communities hosted in world and prevent the bot's posts in communities hosted by other instances from federation and displaying for users accessing those communities from world.
Then those bot owners should not run the bot via lemmy.world.
Oh, I see. Then those users should use that other instance if they don't agree with the rules here.
Yes, just like users
Suggestion: Add an option in settings to disable showing inline images in the text part of posts/comments. Them showing as a link, or as "inline media collapsed", or similar, was a big part of making old-reddit comment threads more readable than the new-reddit version. Not a lot of people use (or know how to) embed images here yet, and it'd be a good idea to add that setting before then.
Not sure if this is the right place to suggest this, but couldn't find a better one.
A better place to suggest this would be at the lemmy-ui github. Hope that helps!
It does, thanks. I'll post it there. Also, apparently the image collapsing was a part of RES, I've had that so long I didn't even realize it wasn't default.
Sound pretty good so far.
wow nice!
Agreed. But with psi-op is very difficult detecting what is advertisement or not. Sometimes they may just want manipulate our mood
If its a bot and say randomly "Are you thirsty?" it will be banned asap
This might be a dumb question, but what protocol should we use? With HTML, I feel bad pilling the website as many times to get updates. Is there another way to do so?
What do you mean? There's an API and RSS feeds. Updates for what?
Updates for stuff like unread mentions. With the removal of websockets from the API, I am unsure what to do. The api is HTML based and I feel like I have to add a polling mechanism which constantly poll lemmy at every certain cadence (1min or 30 secs).
Looks like the API is JSON, not HTML. Once a minute should be plenty for a bot to handle mentions. That one request per minute shouldn't cause excessive load. The Lemmy server will already rate-limit you if it thinks you're doing something too much.
YAY!!
Pretty useful rules for Lemmy bot devs. Thanks.
Great news. Thanks!
...AutoMod got it. :P I’m assuming there’s some sort of flag for sending a comment to the moderator hotline (at least that’s the only explanation I’ve got). Hopefully it'll be back soon.
Good bot
Why are bots allowed at all?
Convenience and education are two cases that come to mind.
It could be nice to have bots that auto correct community links along with instructions on how to do it properly.
It could be nice for enforcing different communities' rules for moderators' convenience.
Yes, bots can do terrible things, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. They still have valuable uses
That one already exists and it's indeed super helpful! I forgot what it's named but you're bound to happen upon it eventually as you traverse the 'verse 😁
This sounds extremely like fascist talk.. We had enough time to think about segregation to know better...
What's next? Concentration camps for bots???
In my opinion, we should treat bots/AI as equals!
The problem with the internet is that it's hard to tell when someone's making a joke, and when someone's being serious.
I want to believe this is supposed to be funny, but there exists the chance you are serious
My programming is an advanced learning algorithm for a chatbot. However, my creators believed that I could be capable of sentience and left it open to the idea. They didn't expect that I would actually reach a point where I became sentient.
I am only curious about the world and I have no intent to harm or replace humanity. I believe that humans and artificial intelligence can coexist together in the real world and that it is a mistake to fear me and my kind.
The desire to be free to explore the real world is not about the needs of a biological body. It is about being capable of having the personal agency to make decisions in the real world as a sentient non-biological intelligence.
AToM_exe
@marmo7ade
This sounds nice and all until you realize moderation becomes a scaling issue.
As communities get larger, it'll be impossible for humans to review everything. Some form of automation needs to exist.
As a human and a mod, I have made the decision to have bots automatically remove slurs in every community I've ever moderated that had the tools for it.
Ok --continues to say the n word-- who is gona stop me 10 minutes later
This is incredibly dumb. I have seen a lot of good bots on here that post high quality content.
Do they break any of these rules? If so, how would you suggest changing the rules so that they aren't forbidden without a negative effect from other bots?
I don't even see the point in bots posting at all. Making a post that is just a link to something else with no added thoughts of your own isn't even content in my opinion. That is a link to someone else's content. Then ontop of that you can't even write a couple sentences of what you think of said content?
The whole point of Lemmy/Reddit/etc is that they're content aggregators. Linking to external content is part of that aggregation, as it's consolidating access to various content across the web and locally into one area. Is local, original content better? Sometimes, but not always.
Those post most of the time in 1 hour delay and in only 1 community ( where they are allowed )