Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won’t help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn’t his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what’s next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It’s been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn’t the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

  • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    yes, i agree. i don’t think anyone should be banned off the back of an ai ruling; at most it should just immediately flag the admin team who could then review and ban. but i don’t think it’s too arduous to just have to upload to imgur or catbox instead. especially if the alternative is paying a team to do it manually, or shutting down

    maybe i’m just old enough that externally hosting images on fora is the standard, and locally hosting is a newfangled feature that costs the site money; though. that’s one of the reasons i like lemm.ee; and i’ve only used the local image feature once or twice apart from icons and banners

      • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        but self-hosting has some major benefits, mainly that the content stays up so long as the forum keeps it up. You never run into having thousands of dead links because imgur banned porn or some other website changed their policy.

        yes, this is really annoying… but (and i don’t know) it’s possible that the cost of hosting images is what shuts these sites down. so you have the option of a forum with no images, or no forum at all. that’s just conjecture though, i don’t know

        the content stays up so long as the forum keeps it up.

        also, this bit isn’t even true for the fediverse. if an instance (say, lemmy.world) goes down, a link like https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/168a4571-489d-46d8-b1d2-48acb6a3d1c2.png will be dead even though the thread, community, and lemmy as a whole are still up[1]

        Regarding putting things in a queue for approval, I’m wary of it due to personal experience moderating on reddit. I was a mod on a mid-size subreddit, but with an outsized amount of trolls trying to get the subreddit banned, so we had to make certain posts operate on approval when they covered certain topics to avoid getting the admins upset that we didn’t have 24/7 people moderating

        you could have a prompt saying: “Your post may have been detected as CSAM. You may post it using an external image host, or appeal and wait for an admin to adjudicate”; thus informing people of their options

        but the point is: without using ai, you have the option of: 1) no uploading of images at all, 2) relying on user reports (too slow and unreliable for illegal content), 3) no image uploads at all. now whilst i personally am a fan of the latter, i think it’s objectively worse for the majority of people

        basically; if there aren’t enough admins to do this with ai; there definitely aren’t enough admins to do it without ai

        leading to posts taking hours to get approved, thus burying the post under every new submission not sent to the queue

        you could get around this bit specifically by actually posting the post when it gets approved, from a backend point of view

        1. see: the whole lemmy.fmhy.ml fiasco ↩︎