I assisted admins, caught and got banned over the past week a user noobda, who created accounts noobde, noobdaREBRN and now noobrao.
A few hours later now, I see 3-4 downvotes on every single comment of mine in the past week, and have gotten repeated death threats in PMs, likely by this very person.
Is an IP address or IP range ban a good solution, that admins should consider implementing besides report option?
I feel incredibly harassed here at Lemmy, though nothing common, where reddit users have abuse reported me to seek suicide prevention helpline, among many things.
Hey, if you’re getting death threats in PMs please reach out directly to admins. That is not something we tolerate. I am not sure what options like IP bans exist or will exist. We don’t want anybody to be harassed.
4chan is an anonymous imageboard, very similar to Lemmy in design of how accounts can be made and used. They use IP ban and IP range bans for such users, something that could be implemented here. I do not know if that has anything to do with Cloudflare protection they use, which is not used here by security principles, but it might be possible to do that here.
Just a suggestion by someone extremely active here. Admins and developers, please consider it.
A lot of comments by the mentioned accounts were removed by agreeable, dessalines and nutomic, as they understood what was going on and I assisted them. Here are the remaining comments pic 1
| pic 2
Banning IP ranges is a terrible “solution”. It hurts innocent while malicious actor could always circumvent it easily by using proxy/VPN/Tor.
My crude suggestion would be to restrict voting for new accounts (until certain karma threshold and time passed) like on HackerNews (one of the most civilized and helpful comment sections I’ve ever seen, lemmy has a lot to learn from it).
Additionally it could cost you karma to downvote, so unless you bring something useful to discussions once in a while, you can’t downvote others.
Another option is to disable visible vote counter for everyone, so there would be little point in downvoting as means of harassment
Not having karma numbers is helping a lot here, so that might work. Also there should be X number of comments made before voting rights are obtained, because that is what is allowing these sockpuppets to act hideously, manipulating and derailing discussions.
Complex problems will start to arrive, as Lemmy becomes bigger. The concern here is also preventing Lemmy from becoming a cesspool, and to avoid what happened to me.
IP ban and IP range bans
Not a good idea, really. If one user is within a living group of say 15 people using one home DSL line, all of them will be blocked. (Note : Debian blocks one or more of the ip addresses of the VPN service I use, just for wiki.debian.org sub domain - So, one day I get a blocked notification, and another day I can read. Sad …) Personally I like to see the down vote feature off in the global settings to create a more friendly atmosphere, as some people seem to have down voting as their hobby. I like the idea mentioned in another of building up credit first. If you do not comment on posts at all after signing up, then you will have no down vote rights. Only after you have commented say five times you get down vote rights.
Voat has that system of building up credit before your votes count. I heard someone say it helped create an echo chamber, but I wouldn’t know because I stopped visiting pretty quickly. Worth looking at as a case study though.
Five times seems low. Every troll or such user I have observed has commented 7-10 comments before snapping up on people.
I agree though, one other user suggested this. It should work well. Even Discord has bits that assign you a level of participation. With Level 5, you get ability to post media, as example. Really good.
Not only that. What is about people behind CG-NAT? or in which the ISP recycle the same set of IPs for several people.
I have saw several situations of a IP change with captcha solving in cloudflare-based websites because user/users who owned it before got reported for abuse.
Good point. I forgot that nowadays dynamic ip addresses are still handed out by ISPs (I am kind of spoiled with a static ip).
we decided against doing IP bans because it could keep users who use VPNs from logging in, since VPN IPs aren’t always unique. I just banned this person for being a troll, but I’m not entirely sure if they’re banned from the main branch or just Lemmygrad. I banned this person before for commenting a death threat on a main branch post. I don’t remember how to do @s, but it might be worth getting the attention of one of the main branch admins for this.
They can definitely help, ask them.
Just a crazy idea, but why not make lemmy invite-only like lobsters so if someone repeatedly does harm we can disable invitations for the inviter? Everyone on lemmy would be able to invite after one more (of so) if you have at least X karma.
I see it as a configurable solution, as Lemmy isn’t only the site but rather a platform.
You can’t deal with the internet, just don’t use it
