As we see more and more bots on Lemmy World every day, it’s about time we publish a set of rules for bots and bot-owners.

So here goes:

  • Bots shall not be used for any kind of advertising.

  • The bot accounts must be clearly marked as a bot. Both in the bio and by marking the account as a bot.

  • The owner of the bot and contact details must be mentioned in the bot’s bio.

  • Bots are only allowed to post in communities they have the explicit permission from the community’s owners to do so.

  • Bots from other instances that post in Lemmy World communities must follow the same rules.

  • Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content.

  • Bots shall not be “spammy”, as in multiple posts per minute.

  • Breaking any of these rules will result in a ban for the Bot and, if required, its owner.

  • Commands must use the bots mention as prefix, and not a text prefix like !help

These rules will be updated when needed.

  • CosmicSploogeDrizzle
    10•1 year ago

    So, while I am not using it at the moment, would an RSS bot for specific community news from official sources violate the “spammy” rule?

    I run/mod the PS5 community on lemmy.ml and I previously used a bot to pull in articles specifically just from PlayStation Youtube and PlayStation Blog. This would sometimes result in about 5-6 links being posted at the same time. I have been posting these manually and spreading them out myself, but if I were to ever reintroduce this bot, would this violate the rule? It is my community and I maintain the bot account.

    The bot in question is a modified version of Lemmy-Mega-Bot. I am not the developer of the bot, I only modified it for my sources.