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.

  • Skyraptor7
    31·
    3 years ago

    This might be a dumb question, but what protocol should we use? With HTML, I feel bad pilling the website as many times to get updates. Is there another way to do so?

    • SheeEttinBanned
      6·
      3 years ago

      What do you mean? There’s an API and RSS feeds. Updates for what?

      • Skyraptor7
        61·
        3 years ago

        Updates for stuff like unread mentions. With the removal of websockets from the API, I am unsure what to do. The api is HTML based and I feel like I have to add a polling mechanism which constantly poll lemmy at every certain cadence (1min or 30 secs).

        • SheeEttinBanned
          6·
          3 years ago

          Looks like the API is JSON, not HTML. Once a minute should be plenty for a bot to handle mentions. That one request per minute shouldn’t cause excessive load. The Lemmy server will already rate-limit you if it thinks you’re doing something too much.