Remote View

1y ago

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:

Bots shall not be used for any kind of advertising.
The bot accounts must be clearly marked as a bot. Both in the bio and by marking the account as a bot.
The owner of the bot and contact details must be mentioned in the bot’s bio.
Bots are only allowed to post in communities they have the explicit permission from the community’s owners to do so.
Bots from other instances that post in Lemmy World communities must follow the same rules.
Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content.
Bots shall not be “spammy”, as in multiple posts per minute.
Breaking any of these rules will result in a ban for the Bot and, if required, its owner.
Commands must use the bots mention as prefix, and not a text prefix like !help

These rules will be updated when needed.

222 comments

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
  
  No cookie
- Done. Thanks for the tip ❤️
  
  How is your name in red?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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
  
  ROCK AND STOOOONNNEEE!
  
  Did I hear a rock and stone?
- 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.
  
  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?
- GROND
- Seconding this. I hope you get an answer.

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.
- 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?
  
  The bot that told users when all the numbers in their post added up to 69 / 420 as well.
  
  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

Love the bots no just reposting links to Reddit, I fucking hate that

Hi @MrCenny@lemmy.world @ruud@lemmy.world,
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.
  
  I am in the process of making on for R Reddevils. It’s using flash pre to get the data
- 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.
- TheBenShapiroBot was funnier than the vast, vast majority of reddit.
  
  I never saw this one. What type of things did it say?
- 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

Bots are only allowed to post in communities they have the explicit permission from the community’s owners to do so.
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
  
  Noob question: How can you tell a bot is a bot? What am I looking for? A little B next to the username or something?

Great rules! Bots are vital, but can quickly become a disaster.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Bots can not be used for any kind of advertising.
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?

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?

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 @automodbeta@lemmy.world 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
  Shows this help message
  Example: @me help

Bots are only allowed to post in communities they have the explicit permission from the community’s owners to do so.
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.

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.

amazing !! keep up the good work thanks

Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content.
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.
- 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".

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.

These are very reasonable rules. Thanks for doing this!

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.

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 !totallynotrobots@lemmy.world 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"

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. 👍

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?

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.

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!

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.
- Yes, just like users

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).

YAY!!

Pretty useful rules for Lemmy bot devs. Thanks.

Great news. Thanks!

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
  
  It could be nice to have bots that auto correct community links along with instructions on how to do it properly.
  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

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 )

222 comments