A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars....
A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:
Using KES, enable General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.
Next, enable General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.
If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.
3 or 4 spam "Buy Phloboxidril Now In Your Area" posts per day were tolerable. 20 to 50 aren't. I know I could block the magazine, but I'm just one of the many who are subjected to it....
Using this approach, I am seeing none of those posts on /science. I updated the filters a bit today. The top post is a legitimate article from 2024-04-13 and is by HeartyBeast.
Now, I understand that this is seen as an unnecessary step (too fancy) for some. People want zero ads out of the box without anything extra. So I'm thinking about the next approach here.
Framing the problem:
Filtering should be automatic
End-user wants zero additional setup
There is no active upstream development
It's not possible to inherit moderation of a magazine due to some queue of moderator application requests that is not being approved
The third point and fourth points are important here, since that's currently intractable. You can't reconcile zero additional setup with that.
But let's suppose becoming moderator of a defunct magazine (point 4) were possible while point 3 remained unresolved. In other words, at least moderators can try to pick up the pieces. Something being underestimated here is how annoying it would be for the moderator to manually cull posts every single day. I think you would have instant turnover after a couple of weeks once the tedium sets in. Manual solution is not good. Clearly, automation is needed on the moderation side.
So assuming you could actually inherit a magazine, but with no guarantee of upstream development, what about restructuring the tool above so that it's for moderators, instead of end-users? That's pretty easy, and I could make it something the moderator clicks once and it's done, auto-banning the posts. This is a pretty good method.
But you can't inherit moderation right now, so that's back to square one.
Realistically, that leaves these options at the moment:
Wait (a long time) and see
Use the tool above and make magazines readable, albeit at some sacrifice of convenience (?)
Migrate to another instance
Third approach is the path of least resistance and is best for most casual users. Second is for diehards who cannot move instances due to some personal or technical reason. First approach is the most annoying and eventually leads to the third approach after frustration sets in.
Pick your poison, I guess. I can't think of any other prophylactic approach at the moment, maybe this comment triggers some idea.
I don't read magazines in-depth much either, so I wasn't aware of the extent of the issue at first, but I was appalled at what I saw. I agree with you that it creates a negative impression for anyone wanting to venture into or use a magazine. I know that needing KES upfront may be a non-starter for some people, but for me the difference with filtering is night and day now.
I understand if you don't want to add yet another third-party tool just to browse the site, but if you feel at all inclined, give it a try. For me 99% of magazines went from unusable to essentially clean.
If the script can automatically block any user whose post it suppresses, it would be awesome.
It does! I've reworded the OP to hopefully make that clearer. After using this approach for a few days, my blocklist (generated entirely programmatically) is ten pages long, and there is nary a bad post in sight. I'm expanding the filters on a daily basis.
I think the auto report function is severely needed; it's happening everywhere.
The idea is that it takes the burden off of myriad (N) users having to manually do this themselves, and lets a single user (the KES custodian) prepare the filters, which then propagate out to any user of KES. Instead of 1,000 people manually blocking, one person builds the heuristics, and everyone benefits.
Preventing this issue doesn't seem like a userscript issue...but I think the issue is that we need to get support top-down on this.
I understand, but the stated goal of KES is addressing issues that can't, or won't (due to some design conflict), be addressed, or which fall through the cracks. At the moment I'm seeing a lot of people voicing frustration, but due to the skeleton crew situation with administration of the site, it seems like screaming into the void. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and hopefully it gets some traction. But my job with KES is just to provide fixes for the end-user, albeit of a third-party nature.
I'm going to be expanding coverage on a rolling basis through a series of updates. If there is a specific magazine where you keep running into this problem, please let me know.
Thanks. I've released a small hotfix that extends coverage further. As for stuff showing up in the "random threads" sidebar, I believe this area is a lost cause, since it populates content regardless of whether it is being blocked or not. I suggest just disabling it via the General > Hide sidebar elements feature.
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In all seriousness...I don't know if you saw my last thread about KES in this magazine, but I suggest giving it a try. I've extended the filter coverage based on your feedback, and those magazines should essentially be expunged of garbage for the time being.
As for the sidebar, I believe the implementation is fundamentally flawed because it loads content that, AFAIK, doesn't respect your actual block settings. I suggest disabling the random threads element altogether in KES by navigating to General > Hide sidebar elements.
Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that a third-party prophylactic tool is a definitive solution to what is ultimately a separate problem, just trying to be pragmatic here and restore basic readability for end-users, whether the filtering is done at the source or after the fact.
Let's be real here, we are talking about unmoderated magazines on an instance where the developer is AWOL and using a framework that is lacking many basic features. Even with moderators, manual moderation can be a big ask and is time-consuming for free volunteers, depending on the volume of posts or how rudimentary the moderation tools are.
I actually don't read kbin magazines much, so I wasn't aware of the extent of the problem until I started opening those magazines more closely, and felt that something is better than nothing.
On the magazines you mentioned, I do see a few anomalous patterns that I'll start filtering. For the most part, with filtering enabled, they were almost entirely free of garbage, save for a few patterns I may have missed on the first few passes. /programming and /food I need to take a deeper look at. The /food thing is good intel, because the use of Amazon referral links in the threads is something that can be generalized to other situations beyond books. Posting referral links is definitively block-worthy.
I also noticed some stuff that by any other name would be considered a thinly-veiled ad, such as specific users only posting articles to web sites they own and operate. I'm not talking about bots as such, but actively promoting one's own content--even when such content is on-topic for the magazine. I declined to filter this stuff yet, because it received a lot of upvotes and seemed to be received favorably, maybe because the readers felt it was at least germane to the topic at hand? I think this is probably true for /food as well, because the line between "content" and "promotion" is unclear here, since what is a food blog if not a product generating click revenue? It seems like the tolerance threshold for that sort of thing is higher in a magazine like /food versus some other magazine. Anyway, I digress. I'm not treating such stuff as in scope, just filtering what is blatantly noise.
Yep, I meant to say /books when I was talking about Amazon links. Sorry.
As for the posts on /food, I have totally vanilla settings (no language filtering or anything) and I saw all of the posts you both mentioned.
Well, with the exception of the garbage posts, because in answer to lemon's earlier question, those have long since been scrubbed on the filter side. But they did exist before I started filtering.
All of that low hanging fruit kind of stuff has been banished, and I am mainly working on edge cases at this point.
Could blocked magazines no longer appear in Random Post and Random Thread sidebars?
A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars....
Please turn off science
3 or 4 spam "Buy Phloboxidril Now In Your Area" posts per day were tolerable. 20 to 50 aren't. I know I could block the magazine, but I'm just one of the many who are subjected to it....
OC KES 4.1.0: Improving the signal to noise ratio by blocking unsolicited ads
The blurb below is excerpted verbatim from the release notes. For the full release notes, see here....
OC Banning spam accounts
Banning spam accounts on kbin.social is a cumbersome affair....