We’ve had some trouble recently with posts from aggregator links like Google Amp, MSN, and Yahoo.

We’re now requiring links go to the OG source, and not a conduit.

In an example like this, it can give the wrong attribution to the MBFC bot, and can give a more or less reliable rating than the original source, but it also makes it harder to run down duplicates.

So anything not linked to the original source, but is stuck on Google Amp, MSN, Yahoo, etc. will be removed.

    • @jordanlundOPM
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      35 hours ago

      Not seeing any suggestions there to improve the bot, but lots of bannable attacks on other users, mods and admins.

      So I’ll say it again, as I’ve told other people complaining, I’m open to making the bot better. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

      1. It has to be automated, which means accessible through an API.

      2. It has to be no/low cost. Lemmy.World doesn’t have a budget for this. We met with an MBFC alternative, they wanted 6 figures. HARD no.

        • @jordanlundOPM
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          13 hours ago

          I can’t, it’s Admin level.

          • @[email protected]
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            43 hours ago

            You could ask them to remove it. Or you could ban it. The other news community doesn’t have it any more. Clearly, it is possible.

          • @[email protected]
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            43 hours ago

            Why is it admin level? Are there admins that tell you what you can and can’t do with the politics community, in this case? Or does the politics moderation team have the ability to ditch the bot if they decide to?

            This is such a strange situation. If you’re stuck in that former position, though, it would make a lot of your responses in this comments section make a whole lot more sense.

            • @jordanlundOPM
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              13 hours ago

              The Admins run lemmy.world, we serve at their pleasure.

              Sure, I could ban it, then likely get removed and have the bot re-instated, and what good would that do anyone?

      • @[email protected]
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        44 hours ago

        How much are you paying for the MBFC API? The page says it isn’t free. I’ll give you an API endpoint which will check sources against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, if you pay me half of whatever you were paying MBFC previously. That list is quite a lot better than relying on MBFC.

        I already scraped the list. It’ll take around an hour for my script to finish going down the sources and assigning web sites to each one, but I can have a working API endpoint for you tomorrow morning. I can do the bot part also, if you prefer. That’s probably easier than making a new endpoint and hooking it to a bot and debugging the connection and all.

        Like I said, I think the idea that readers won’t be able to determine that Breitbart is unreliable is missing a pretty big elephant in the misinformational room. If the issue that’s causing you to keep MBFC is finding a better source that’s programmatic, though, then solving that is almost trivially easy and at least seems like some kind of step forward.

        • @RookiA
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          12 hours ago

          MBFC API is free as they gave us access for us as a Non Profit.

          We already had in mind adding these sources to our bot but we didnt had the time and knowledge how to scrape that. Personally i would like to host it on our own server so that we dont require you to use your own money just for one bot, in what programming language did you write it?

          Thanks a lot!
          Rooki

          • @[email protected]
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            31 hour ago

            Since it’s a MediaWiki page you can get Markdown source of the page with appending action=raw query to the URL.

        • @jordanlundOPM
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          13 hours ago

          To be honest, that’s Rooki’s deal, but I’ll link them to this comment!

        • @jordanlundOPM
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          14 hours ago

          I can’t ignore suggestions nobody is making. Have a better service in mind? Feel free to present it.

          We looked at AllSides, which is good for bias, but has no scoring for credibility.

          • @grue
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            2 hours ago

            Stop pretending that “get rid of the bot” doesn’t count as a suggestion. That’s dishonest.

            I don’t even care about the bot itself, but at this point I’m just getting pissed off by all the constant distracting bickering about it.

            • @jordanlundOPM
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              123 minutes ago

              When the question is “how do we improve it?” the answer “get rid of it” is not a genuine suggestion.

              The GOOD news is, we DO have a genuinely good suggestion here and the bot creator will be reaching out.

          • @[email protected]
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            84 hours ago

            “We have to keep using the ratings website made by a random dude with no background in journalism who makes it available for free because real fact checking services cost money” is perhaps not the argument I would use for why the bot is both accurate and useful.

            You don’t have to have a bot at all, especially to replace something like blacklisting Breitbart URLs, but someone thought the idea sounds cool. So “don’t have the bot” has been unnecessarily eliminated as an option. Even though sometimes the best option really is to just not have a bot.

            • @[email protected]
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              4 hours ago

              I mean, it’s a great argument for not going with actual fact checkers, unless you’re volunteering to pay.

              Not having one is also an option, but for my 2 cents the bot seems accurate enough so far, and it’s easy enough to ignore if you really don’t like it.

              • @[email protected]
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                34 hours ago

                I’m definitely not paying to have a “think for me” bot on an instance I’m not part of. You can’t automod your way out of media illiteracy.

      • @Docus
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        136 seconds ago

        Ok, i’ll bite. I don’t value the bot (in part because it rates sites/newspapers and not authors or articles. Good news sites have the occasional shit article and vice versa), so please reduce the precious space it takes up on my mobile device. A one liner with a link would be enough.