Hi there, I'm currently working on solving the problem. There will be significant changes this month. I know it's taking longer than I initially announced, but this will be a really solid release. The contributors have made an incredible work and I didn't want to miss anything.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/381108/Lots-of-new-spam#entry-comment-2209332
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Seem to get a lot of pharmaceutical spam in the science magazine.
Very happy to volunteer as co-mod if you would like help squashing it.
It's partly specific to the kbin software, and partly specific to kbin.social. The biggest problem is that the software doesn't currently support having more than one administrator account per instance.
The flagship instance, kbin.social, is administered by ernest, who is also the lead developer of the project. Working on the software seems to keep him plenty busy, to the point where he's not able to keep up with administrator tasks.
Since kbin.social was (I assume) not used by very many people before the reddit migration, almost all the older magazines are owned by ernest, and have no other moderators set. There's also a large number of magazines that were created during the migration, but have since been abandoned by their owners. Reassigning these is a task that currently only ernest can do.
And of course as the most populated instance, kbin.social is a more desirable target for spammers, compared to the other kbin instances.
It certainly seems like a kbin.social specific problem to me, whenever I see spam, it's from there.
It happens every couple of days, and has been happening for a while. I have resisted instance blocking until now, but it gets harder every time this happens.
I would buy that it's a "sort by new" specific problem if they actually were taken down promptly, but they are often up for hours before I see them. It's probably a case of "mods are asleep, post research reports". There needs to be more mods, and/or a better automod.
I do rarely see it on other kbins. Honestly kind of surprising considering kbin has no API. Not that it's super difficult to do some headless browser automation but it sort of seems like whoeever is doing it must be super dedicated to targeting kbin.
Do you mostly see it on m/random or other magazines? I've seen it elsewhere but it mostly seems to be from there. I kind of don't quite see the point in allowing threads / microblogs to be made from a local kbin instance to m/random. Threads especially, at least. I sort of am thinking it might be nice if m/random was locked from local posting so you had to file it under a magazine with moderators, but spam bots would likely just make their own magazines or spam others and that wouldn't really solve the problem.
I've seen it on other magazines recently, and it seems to be getting worse. I downvote & report, but I'm not sure if anyone ever actually removes it.
Totally anecdotally, it seems from my perspective to be kbin specific as 90% of the spam/bots I've been seeing are on from kbin.