An admin deleted all my uploads and I have no clue why

I have been uploading comic art images by Moebius for several weeks almost daily to the !eurographicnovels community, where I´m a moderator myself. All those images have disappeared. Modlog says the images have been deleted by “admin”. Modlog gives no reason for this but says the images were later restored by “admin” but that is not true. All my comic art posts have been destroyed and are empty posts now. I was not even contacted a single time about this and honestly can´t think of a reason because I had uploaded exclusively “safe for work” and apolitical material. We are trying to build a community for european graphic novels like “Tintin”, “Lucky Luke” and “The Incal” and I put a lot of love in those posts because I want to help make our community interesting and grow. However - I have been stongly discouraged to contribute content now that I have seen it gets arbitrarily wiped by anonymus admins. How can I find out what happened, who deleted my stuff and why they did so? How can I avoid this happeing to my posts in the future?

JohnnyEnzyme, (edited )

I’m the founder of the community in question, and one of the first things I noticed is that an admin @Xylinna restored some of the posts even while OP was still banned. Unfortunately their action was useless what with the images being blocked or deleted from LW.

So I reached out to that person a day or two ago, and have heard nothing but crickets, so far. EDIT: They responded just now, altho it sounds a lot like they don’t know much about the issue. Credit to them for trying to help, however.

It also appears my colleague still hasn’t received any meaningful response.

Point is-- I don’t understand this business of volunteering for a public-facing role and then either neglecting or refusing to communicate with users who’ve been wronged for one reason or another.

They are well within copyright in terms of timeline. Anything after 1927 can and likely is subject to copyright. I don’t like it but that’s how it works. Given that they are images from trading cards, it would not surprise me if the rights holder was enforcing copyright through a third party service.

Granted, but I don’t think that was the issue in this case. The Moebius images in question were arbitrarily removed/blocked, with most being zapped, but others remaining.

For the record, none of the many other copyrighted images were removed, either.

@GoldenCow @Kichae @Candelestine @crypticthree

Candelestine,

Unfortunately, we have no mechanism to prevent bad Instance admins from engaging in bad practices, afaik. People just need to spread the word that that particular Instance might have some bad policies going on, so others can make more informed decisions.

It’s an inherent challenge to decentralization though. If anyone can make an Instance, then how can you verify that the Instance you were putting your community on was run by trustworthy, reliable people? In these early stages especially, when nobody has known anyone else for very long.

All that said, I am still hoping this is some kind of innocent mistake or technical bug. But I am completely unable to say. I do know a fair bit about Lemmy, but I’m not a self-hoster or other expert user that might know the ins and outs of the back end.

JohnnyEnzyme,

People just need to spread the word that that particular Instance might have some bad policies going on, so others can make more informed decisions.

Right, and I feel like that’s a big part of what OP is doing here. I think we just have to let the reputational dust settle and go with that flow.

What I’m also concerned about is what kind of failsafe the big instances have. For example, if something happened to my instance-runner and the place went down, federation would only help so much. So altho the content would be preserved, all those communities would be dead in the water, and their subscribers lost. That would be a terrible blow after months or even years of building them up, plus providing content, which is what I’ve been doing steadily for two months now at my place. If I had to start over at another instance, I don’t think I’d have the heart, even though I’ve tried to locally archive everything, including a good chunk of the reviews I write by hand.

All that said, I am still hoping this is some kind of innocent mistake or technical bug.

Yup, hopefully. On the surface it’s a disastrous one, and the admin I’m talking to has put in a ticket, at the least. But it’s turning in to a good bit of hard work we didn’t need to manually restore some of the lost image content. Most of the content is gone however, despite the posts being restored.

Whole situation bloody well sucks, and wasn’t helped by my colleague OP receiving no communication or explanation of any kind. AFAIK they still haven’t been contacted, so we’re talking at least two major failures on the part of LW.

Candelestine,

When dealing with a volunteer project, even a large one, I would allow multiple days for communication.

They do not have a staff and structure like a company would, so we cannot hold them to the same standards, that is not reasonable.

We’re probably always going to get fairly bad customer support here, most likely. Unless they start charging a fee or putting in a lot of ads or something.

edit: Simply due to how massively outnumbered they are by us random internet denizens and our abilities to find and cause problems.

JohnnyEnzyme,

I understand and agree with those things, but disagree that OP’s situation fits that kind of model. No, in this case it was a slew of LW failures that I should think would drive most victims away, no matter the setting.

Consider:

  • user is banned for evidently no reason at all
  • user is seemingly in compliance with all site rules & guidelines, including image upload rules
  • user has no previous strikes or violations
  • no communication of any kind is offered to user for the ban
  • the user is also locked out of their acct, with no way to appeal from said acct
  • the banning agent evidently remains unknown, days later
  • one unrelated admin got involved only after the community owner personally reached out to them
  • unfortunately, said admin has very little tools or ability to investigate any of this
  • despite the light (24hr) nature of the ban, all of the user’s local image content is evidently destroyed irreversibly, representing many hours and days of work

Understanding and excusing part of that due to the volunteer nature of LW is one thing, but IMO this is a next-level clusterfluff.

Indeed, I understand that LW previously put a lot of effort in to attracting Rexxiters, to some degree at the expense of other instances, and maybe this is what it looks like when there isn’t enough staff & process to handle the magnitude of userbase the instance runners desired. Maybe that’s something to consider as well, when volunteers sign up for a project.

Candelestine,

I do not think it is wise to consider more things until we have more perspectives on what happened. Is any of this time sensitive, and requires to be addressed today?

JohnnyEnzyme, (edited )

We can only construct our working conclusions based on the known information, which is what I’m doing.

Yes, and there is a time-sensitive nature to this stuff that needs to be quickly addressed, starting with the amount of repairs my mod and I will need to coordinate on in order for our sub not to look like a hot mess. Unfortunately, him being in a very different time zone means there’s almost nothing I can do until tomorrow morning.

This would make little difference if the community had low presence and activity, but we now have almost 300 subscribers, are growing fairly quickly by Lemmy standards, and are in the presence of ‘getting the word out.’

I understand your perspective and your seemingly benign intent, but frankly, you’re not helping. Just like instance runners and their staff, we are ALSO volunteers, aiming to serve and support our userbase, as well as doing our part to help make the Fediverse a viable Reddit-alternative. We’ve been working hard on this project, and have every right to feel aggrieved for the stated reasons.

Feel free to have the last reply if you like, but again-- you’re not helping here, and I don’t plan on responding further. Good day.

Candelestine,

Quite alright. I’m just trying to control the degree of finger-pointing until we have more information. However we may feel, there is only so much we can realistically accomplish with the resources at our disposal.

JohnnyEnzyme,

Well, ten days later and none of the images were restored, no LW staff ever responded further to either of us, and no new information came along to explain the clusterfluff.

Compare that to the speedy, excellent responses and service of my own instance staff, and there’s just no way I could honestly recommend LW. Indeed, nothing has changed to indicate that any other user here might not randomly get temp-banned and their uploads wiped.

FYI-- your refrain of ‘let’s not jump to any rash conclusions’ was in the end useless, and even detrimental, since patience availed us nothing, and we’re still trying to clean up the mess over on our sub/community.

Candelestine,

Detrimental? In what way?

Cabeza2000, (edited )

I follow your Moebius posts in the !eurographicnovels community and I am sure this is upsetting with all the effort you put in those posts.

Anyway, I hope that you decide to continue posting.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you my dude! I might do that in the future but I´m pretty discouraged right now.

nyakojiru,
@nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Never give up , change instance and continue with new stuff , forget about what was lost. Your effort were amazing and even more with one of the most brilliant comic artists. I would recommend mine, it’s very open minded and admins are accesible

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you very much! I will post from my lemm.ee acount using external image hosting in the future.

simulacra_simulacrum,

Love Moebius. Learned about him through some old Heavy Metal magazines. Awesome stuff and reminds me of Alphonse Mucha

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Agreed! His style, especially his lines are so special!

Learned about him through some old Heavy Metal magazines

That is where his stuff was released, oldschool!

FarFarAway,

I saw this last night while searching for an answer to a totally different question

lemm.ee/post/5905754

I know this post was a month ago, but maybe this still applies.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe? I don´t know …

torknorggren,

That’s a different instance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same issues about csam apply on lemmy.world

can,

That instance hosts the community OP was uploading to though.

FarFarAway,

ahh. guess I missed the part where the images were deleted by a lemmy.world admin…whoops

I was missing a bunch of comments up until recently … the must check English language box in a brower on instance site, not in app, issue…

pimento64,

Well let’s ask 'em

@ruud
@MichelleG
@antik
@jelloeater85 @xylinna
@clueless_stoner
@lwadmin
@quinten

Hey guys, looks like banning people and removing posts permanently deletes the actual content from your server, making so that even a post that instantly gets reinstated is already dead. It looks like you don’t know that, because otherwise nobody would have bothered reinstating the posts.

Name and shame, who’s the one to blame? It’s weeaboo time.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you for this contructive comment. I hope admins will answer at some point.

jelloeater85,
@jelloeater85@lemmy.world avatar

<3

JohnnyEnzyme,

removing posts permanently deletes the actual content from your server

Just for the record, the posts were in fact soft-deleted, something that OP and I can do as staff, as well as restoring posts. Indeed, I could be wrong, but it looks like only staff on the instance-runner level can actually perm-delete posts, i.e. even common admins can’t do it.

The whole point of that is pretty clearly to err on the side of caution when deleting, even by post creators and staff. Which is why, like I think you’re implying, it’s such a disaster to have deleted all OP’s image content over… seemingly nothing.

In any case, thanks for weighing in so strongly. We appreciate it!

TropicalDingdong,

Cool picture.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you, this is just one of many I had uploaded.

crypticthree,

Maybe there was a DCMA takedown request?

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Don´t think so, those where all freely available and old images

crypticthree,

They are well within copyright in terms of timeline. Anything after 1927 can and likely is subject to copyright. I don’t like it but that’s how it works. Given that they are images from trading cards, it would not surprise me if the rights holder was enforcing copyright through a third party service.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

That might be the case but is of course pure speculation. I would like to know the official reason though.

GoldenCow,

If you filter modlog by username you will discover that one lemmy.world admin banned you most likely using the “remove content” option thinking you were a spammer and a second lemmy.world admin restored your posts however the images most likely were lost even though the post wasd restored.

Nacktmull, (edited )
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

That would be really fucked up. Do you know if this is this a common “practice” on lemmy? They obviously did not even look at my posts before deleting them because they where clearly comic art images posted in a community dedicated to exactly this kind of material. I put quite some work and time into those posts and I won´t continue contributing if abusive admins on a power trip will just arbitralily wipe my stuff accidentially whenever they feel like.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Its a common practise to ban spammers. Yes. Is LW a big corpo whose admins get paid? No! So please, misshaps can happen on every instance.

( and with ur name they could have guessed some CSAM incoming )

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Its a common practise to ban spammers.

How is that relevant, I have never spammed anything? I am helping to build a lemmy community by providing quality content!

Yes. Is LW a big corpo whose admins get paid? No! So please, misshaps can happen on every instance.

I see what you mean but should there not be at least a minimum of communication in such cases?

( and with ur name they could have guessed some CSAM incoming )

Pardon me? What do you mean by that?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

LW had many CSAM attacks ( and all of them had weird names ) and LW admins ( and others ) just seeing: Many posts, Images and then just get the ban hammer. And then you wouldnt communicate with a csam poster. But tbh i dont know the real reason, but that would be my guess. And after seeing that you are banned in “Female Porn Star” for Spam i never thought i would ever see such funny ban.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Please understand that what you are talking about has nothing to do with me. I don’t even know what a CSAM attack is.

My username is not particularly weird. It’s actually so common online that I usually find it has already been taken when trying to make a new account somewhere.

I was simply uploading comic book art images to a community dedicated to … comic book art images, while being a mod of said community. How that is supposed to make me look like a spammer evades me.

I was browsing All and there was a pic of a naked woman with a lot of self harm scars. I commented that self harm scars point to severe mental problems and that I hope she will get better. No clue why they banned me for that, I guess they don’t like it when someone mentions the “dark side” of their beloved porn …

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Ohh… yeah now i know why u got purged / banned. Your comment on the last post got the attention of the admin. It got discussed in the admin chat I THINK that you was a troll bec. of that. That is it i think. ( p.s. they got so many of those so, even if it was serious it got caught )

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Which particular comment do you mean?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

You told in your recent comment what comment

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

You can´t seriously believe that anyone would consider that a reason for a ban and especially not for deleting all my quality content.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Yes. :) LW had enough trolls and admins dont argue with them.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I did not troll, so you make no sense, actually it starts to feel like you are trolling me here …

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Just that you renamed urself to another language is funny.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Yes and that is the reason I’m doing it, it’s supposed to be funny. I use always the same name though, just in different languages. Is that forbidden and a reason to ban people here on lemmy.world?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Idk, if you are mentally down and had many abuse images you dont think over that.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I am not sure what you mean by that. I am very sorry if you have to deal with abuse in any way. Are you getting the support you need?

FinalBoy1975,

It looks like a lot of mistakes were made in your case. I saw your posts asking about dialogue and such. I’m surprised no one has reached out to you because, speaking for myself, when I remove something and give an explanation in the modlog and I’m asked more questions by message, I always reply and explain myself. I’m sure someone will interact with you if you send an admin a message. I looked at the log and it looks like a script or other automated action is to blame. The admin actually caught the issue and tried to restore your posts. It also looks like it was a “suspected spam” type of deletion that was corrected. I understand your irritation. I wouldn’t want to be in your situation because you took lots of time to add content to a community you care about. However, it looks like one of those things we call an “honest mistake” that somebody on the admin team tried to take back. I haven’t seen a case like this, it’s very eye-catching to me, because it’s so obviously a mistake. To help make you feel better, I’ll tell you a little story. 2 years ago I spent about 2000 bucks on a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop. I took it to a computer repair guy to clean the dust out of it on the inside and replace the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU. He used a forced air compressor to clean the fans and didn’t see that a loose wire on his work table was inadvertently in contact with one of the cooling fans. Snap! Broke the fan. He apologized personally to me (like, you know, face to face) and promised me he would replace the component he broke free of charge, plus do the whole entire job in front of me so I could see what he was doing. He fulfilled his promise. I must admit, it was quite boring to sit through watching him take out all the screws, etc. But he kept his word and did the right thing. The people that run lemmy world seem to me to be a lot more honest than dishonest and also very willing to admit they screwed up if they screwed up, just like my computer repair guy. I’m very certain that if you pm an admin the very admin responsible for the error will write to you personally. You were just unlucky. Somebody wrote a bad script or was tired and wasn’t thinking clearly. I think it says a lot about how someone attempted to restore your posts. Also, if the images attached to them can’t be recovered, is it too much work on your part to delete the empty restored posts and just make new posts with the images? Maybe in between posts, you can count to ten so it doesn’t look like spam or something? I think that would help make your community look nicer and more appealing to subscribers who like comic book art.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you for the kind words and support!

GoldenCow,

I do not know if this is often or no i am sorry it happen to you i like the types of posts you make as euro comics are very good maybe admin will give you apology here too

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I just hope the posts can be restored, this has really damaged our community …

Kichae,

if abusive admins on a power trip will just arbitralily wipe my stuff “accidentially” whenever they feel like.

You've jumped to a lot of conclusions here.

You're using a website that's operated by volunteers, that's seen a ton of abuse from spammers and bots, that's run on software that's pre-version-1 and that lacks advanced mod tools, and that likely has an admin team that's using some hacked together third party scripts or tools to try and identify bad actors. It's not only possible, but entirely reasonable, that one of those tools may have falsely identified you as a spam account, and someone either just ran a script that banned a bunch of people, or got into a flow state and just hit the wrong button out of habit.

Pointing fingers and accusing others of bad behaviour out of pure speculation while you're both stomping your feet and having a fit because you feel hurt while simultaneously telling others that the lens they're using is "pure speculation" is... Not productive, to put it mildly.

Polar,

If you’re making your own scripts that can wipe out an entire, legitimate, actively contributing member, you’re incompetent and should shut that shit down.

A script should never do that. It should flag them for manual review.

Sorry, but it’s 100% on the mod team. Let’s switch out power trip for incompetent.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

I don't really have issue with a bot rate limiting, or suspending users (provided the false positive rate is low enough), but there does need to be a robust appeal and undo process which is the bit which seems to be lacking here.

RealFknNito,
@RealFknNito@lemmy.world avatar

That’s always the dilemma. The higher the ratio of banning bots, the higher rate of false positives. Do you want more bots with virtually no users being banned or do you want virtually no bots with a lot of legitiment users being unfairly banned?

The answer most sane people take is the former but not everyone shares that opinion.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Using scripts to flag possible bots/spammers is fine. The final decision should be made by a human though. I would volunteer for that.

RealFknNito,
@RealFknNito@lemmy.world avatar

Sure but you’d need enough volunteers to sort through hundreds or even thousands of flags daily. Not always possible with large userbases but having a ‘likely false positive’ subset that can be done by manual review would be good.

You shouldn’t have lost your contributions and it’s made worse by an ineffective restoration feature.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

You shouldn’t have lost your contributions and it’s made worse by an ineffective restoration feature.

Yes, indeed!

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Flag them for manual review… You forgot that the MANUAL reviewers are f*cking volunteers. LW lost already few because of that trauma. And they would rather wipe a user than have a chance on spreading csam.

Polar,

Don’t volunteer if you’re just going to complain about it. You sound worse than Reddit mods.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

You sound like the unfriendly guy that got banned on r/funny with the reason “unfunny”. You are complaining non stop here.

Polar,

Says the guy who wrote a rant reply to my week old comment. Cope, buddy.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Says the guy who wrote a rant about my rant that you ranted about your issue with the world. Cope not my buddy.

Did you thought about, the possibility, that someone just simply had no time in the past week?

Nacktmull, (edited )
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

You’ve jumped to a lot of conclusions here.

Yes I did, you are right, sorry. I am just angry because I feel that I have been treated in an unfair manner. I edited the part where I jumped to conclusions.

You’re using a website that’s operated by volunteers, that’s seen a ton of abuse from spammers and bots, that’s run on software that’s pre-version-1 and that lacks advanced mod tools, and that likely has an admin team that’s using some hacked together third party scripts or tools to try and identify bad actors.

I understand that but that does not justify nonchalantly destroying all my posts and then not contacting me about it even once.

It’s not only possible, but entirely reasonable, that one of those tools may have falsely identified you as a spam account, and someone either just ran a script that banned a bunch of people

Running a script that automatically deletes posts without human confirmation and without having the ability to bring deleted posts back, in case the script makes a mistake, seems like a questionable and bad practice to me. When they tried to bring the posts back and it turned out that it was not working they should have at least contacted me to communicate what happened.

got into a flow state and just hit the wrong button out of habit.

That person must have really been in the zone then, considering we are talking about 34 posts. Flow state or not, that would be a pretty embarassing fail but still understandable since humans make mistakes - however, not contacting me at all to communicate about what happened is not.

Pointing fingers and accusing others of bad behaviour out of pure speculation while you’re both stomping your feet and having a fit because you feel hurt while simultaneously telling others that the lens they’re using is “pure speculation” is… Not productive, to put it mildly.

I edited the part where I jumped to conclusions …

while simultaneously telling others that the lens they’re using is “pure speculation” is… Not productive, to put it mildly.

The comment you are referring to is de facto based only on speculation. I also wrote that it might be correct but that I would like to know the official reason instead of guessing around. How is that not productive?

Candelestine,

This kinda sounds like it could be a mistake or bug. Contact Instance admins. Maybe other community mods might know something.

Either way, we can’t really help you here without knowing what happened on their end.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I see, will repost in the correct instance, thank you for the explanation.

SheeEttin,

Ask the admins of lemm.ee, not lemmy.world

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

Are you sure? I made all those posts using my lemmy.world account.

southsamurai,
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yeah, it’s the instance the images were uploaded to that matters

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I see, will repost on lemm.ee, thank you!

Wander,
@Wander@yiffit.net avatar

Actually you weren’t wrong. If you’re a Lemmy.world user your images are stored at Lemmy.world

SheeEttin,

Really? That seems weird. I feel like they should live with the post, not the author.

pimento64,

They do live with the post. When you post something to another instance’s community, you’re not posting there, you’re posting to a copy of the community hosted by your home instance. The post is always made from the poster’s instance’s copy of the community, and it federates back.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

I see, so should I still post this on lemm.ee support too, which was told me to do earlier?

JohnnyEnzyme,

Ask the admins of lemm.ee, not lemmy.world

@SheeEttin

These things aren’t correct. Lemm.ee has not been accepting images since the pedophile pic attack on LW.

Also, the one and only source of the problem was here on LW, what with the arbitrary banning and obscuring / deletion of OP’s pics.

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