might still have been related, i guess we'll never know.
the rule i changed did look like it had some false positives at least, so even if it wasn't that it should fix issues that could have been experienced by others randomly.
there is a possibility that this was caused by a cloudflare rule that was not scoped narrowly enough to achieve what it's intended for. does this issue still persist for you?
while it would likely be a good idea to limit this, i don't see a limit in the code that would prevent from blocking more users. what's the actual error message you're seeing?
Our automod doesn't currently inform people that they're banned or how they'd appeal that though. We usually review automod actions within an hour though, in most cases false positives are sorted out before the user even notices them.
you can't use lemmy PMs while you're banned from the instance.
appeals can generally be made in any way that will reach our team; email addresses are listed in the instance sidebar and community sidebar at https://lemmy.world/c/support.
the domain you posted a link to was in our automod blacklist due to previously being used by spam bots.
upon review it appears that this domain serves user generated content by different users that can be determined in the URL path. in those cases we typically only ban those users rather than the entire site if it's not overly spammy.
we also usually review automod actions quickly, although in this specific case we must have missed this, as we had a lot of other true spam removals in the last days.
you have been unbanned from LW and your post has been restored.
please at least try to make an effort to understand technology.
after we received the email about account recovery from the email address linked to Don_Dickle we sent instructions there for how to regain access to that account.
we've switched from using multiple federation sending containers (which are supposed to split receiving instances across workers) to just using a single one.
we're still unsure what might be causing this, but we'll be updating to 0.19.9 soon. maybe that'll fix this issue.