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.

  • miles
    1815·
    3 年前

    Good stuff 👍 Right now you’re using “can” and “should” which are somewhat vague. What happens if bots don’t do something they should?

    Consider clarifying requirements using the following RFC-style language: “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL”.

    ref: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

  • Anti Weeb Penguin
    1324·
    3 年前

    “Bots shall not be used for any kind of advertising” Extremely based

  • JJROKCZ
    571·
    3 年前

    What about bots that exist to respond to certain words in comments like the many lotrmemes bots and wandering dwarf miner for deep rock galactic. I’m sure they’re getting close to several a minute depending on comment traffic on those instances, if this place ever gets Reddit size they’ll definitely be doing several per minute

    • LemmyLefty
      862·
      3 年前

      The admins could throttle those bots down to reasonable posting levels and the meta around it could go from expecting an instant response to being “graced by their presence”. Something something art from adversity something something…

      We don’t have to be a direct copy of Reddit, after all.

      • danc4498
        615·
        3 年前

        We don’t have to be a direct copy of Reddit, after all.

        What I don’t like about statements like this is that it ignores the fact that Reddit was just an interface for people to produce content and experiences that they wanted.

        We are on Lemmy because we want a different interface, not because we want different content/experiences.

        If Lemmy is a direct copy of Reddit, it is because the people want it to be.

        • SheeEttinBanned
          33·
          3 年前

          Personally, I’m on Lemmy because I want a different owner, not a different interface. I liked old reddit just fine. I left due to the monetization of the community.

          • danc4498
            91·
            3 年前

            True, that’s more what I meant by “different interface”. Not actually feels different, just different as in on a different server.

        • SapienSRC
          161·
          3 年前

          Thank you. It would seem some believe Reddit forced us to behave a certain way. Traditions and customary behavior, both good and bad, were developed by the users.

        • LemmyLefty
          7·
          3 年前

          I’m sure that’s true of some people, but my Lemmy experience is different from my Reddit experience and I like it that way. The population on it, in amount and type, the framework and the philosophy behind the framework automatically differentiates it from Reddit, for the better.

          • danc4498
            91·
            3 年前

            Sure, but if there are things on Lemmy that were also on Reddit, it’s not automatically a bad thing. People are bringing things to Lemmy that they enjoyed on Reddit.

            I’m just saying, don’t knock something just because it was a Reddit thing. We’re all here because, to varying degrees, we loved the Reddit experience and are looking for that experience without the owners.

            • LemmyLefty
              24·
              3 年前

              …I’m not? I’m suggesting another way to interact with similar elements of Reddit within the confines of a much smaller space so that it isn’t overwhelmed.

              • danc4498
                51·
                3 年前

                Maybe you didn’t mean it that way, but the part that I quoted came across that way to me. And I’ve seen that same sentiment in many comments on Lemmy. Like, things being done the “reddit” way in Lemmy is a bad thing. Which is why I said something.

                • LemmyLefty
                  36·
                  3 年前

                  Then please remember that you’re interacting with a number of different people and try not to jump the gun.

      • Graphy
        8·
        3 年前

        Kind of a tangent, but I hated when bots went from saying random lines to saying relevant lines.

        Like if you said Gandalf and ‘pass’ in the same comment then you know the Gandalf bot would reply “you … pass!”

        Took the fun away from getting a relevant quote

    • Carnelian
      23·
      3 年前

      Perhaps they could simply be rate limited to once every 60 seconds, and abandon some comments if the traffic is too high?

      • JJROKCZ
        410·
        3 年前

        Yea but that could essentially relegate them to being nonexistent.

        • MBM
          1·
          3 年前

          Is there even more than 1 comment per minute in those comms yet?

    • WörkEnglish
      182·
      3 年前

      I like the character bots, though I find if they take up too much of the commend section of any given post it’s kinda boring; thus I think a limit on their responses is a good thing.

      • dustyDataEnglish
        7·
        3 年前

        I remember going to threads in certain communities where 4 or 5 top comments were just back and forth of character bots repeating the same lines over and over.

    • SheeEttinBanned
      101·
      3 年前

      Please no. Those and the one that quoted Sabaton lyrics were so annoying. They just cluttered up the comments.

    • Dicska
      52·
      3 年前

      I was just thinking about remindme bot. It’s even useful, so I doubt people wouldn’t be happy for it. But it will get loads of requests.

      • Galluf
        20·
        3 年前

        It doesn’t need to publicly respond. A pm would be sufficient.

        • Aa!
          11·
          3 年前

          It also doesn’t need to be publicly requested either. None of us care that someone is setting a reminder on their phone, and that’s all a “remind me” has to be.

          • WhoRoger
            57·
            3 年前

            But we do, it’s the best kind of humour to see someone set a reminder to remind someone of a reminder they don’t want to be reminded of

        • JJROKCZ
          2·
          3 年前

          Good compromise but I don’t know if the traffic load impact of a pm is much different from a comment. I imagine the server load induced by either is roughly the same

          • ChlorineAddict
            5·
            3 年前

            Sending the content wouldn’t be much different, but serving the content would be vastly reduced if it only appeared in one user’s inbox vs being displayed to everyone who visits the thread.

          • MBM
            1·
            3 年前

            I didn’t think it was about server load so much as just user experience (no comment sections filled with bots)

      • JJROKCZ
        1·
        3 年前

        Yea that one gets lots of requests I’m sure

    • minorninth
      1·
      3 年前

      Yeah, I’d love to see a way for bots that respond to text the users specifically add to trigger a bot to be allowed. Stuff like remindme - maybe we don’t need that bot if Lemmy clients have that feature, but I love that it’s possible to implement stuff like remindme as a bot.

      Could we make that type of bot opt-out for communities? Or have keywords for bots to parse in community descriptions?

    • Ippei
      12·
      3 年前

      Seconding this. I hope you get an answer.

    • oursunisdying
      403·
      3 年前

      The link-fixer-bot is really useful on mobile, I hope they can make an exception for this one.

      • itadakimasu
        1065·
        3 年前

        I’d prefer no exceptions. Don’t give an inch.

        • AncientMariner
          54·
          3 年前

          Rules are created to ensure that they work for people. If there is a set of rules to make it better for people, and it doesn’t, they may need a tweak.

        • just_change_it
          323·
          3 年前

          Now you sound like the chief problems with the justice system in the US. We don’t need to be terrible.

          Exceptions should be made on a case by case basis for common sense rationales. Spirit of the law, not letter of the law. This way if someone “technically” doesn’t violate the rules but is still violating the spirit of it - they’ve gotta go. An example would be contact details and ownership info that points to someone who may or may not exist but the contact info actually goes nowhere when you reach out because they never respond to anyone. Bots that just repost content from other sites like twatter and livejournal and reddit technically don’t fall under not just reddit but still violate the spirit of “do not just repost shit from elsewhere with bots”. The imagination of the masses is all that limits the scenarios so common sense needs to apply imo.

          At the same time there will be useful options that technically violate. Something like a remindme bot might hit faster than 1/minute. Some kind of minigame bot that only replies to prompts in a certain sub for just that use case is another scenario. Automoderator replies for incredibly popular subs will probably break 1/min rules if people post faster than 1/min, for instance. Again… common sense!

      • IzzyBanned
        41·
        3 年前

        I agree completely.

      • qaz
        2·
        3 年前

        A temporary exception won’t hurt

      • s38b35M5
        2·
        3 年前

        I’d rather my ex wife just didn’t call me so I don’t have to block her calls. A man can dream…

    • nyar
      10·
      3 年前

      I think posts and comments are different things.

  • Flying Squid
    442·
    3 年前

    Excellent. Bots can be helpful, but they should be few in number. Some of them would drive me crazy on Reddit. Like that stupid ‘water is not wet’ bot.

    • Pandantic
      132·
      3 年前

      The bot that told people if their post’s words were in alphabetical order - like why do we need that?

      • Caboose12000
        11·
        3 年前

        I loved that bot, especially when it would reply to particularly heated comments where someone was getting really mad. nothing funnier than someone losing their shit and then being smacked with “wow, all the words in your comment are in alphabetical order!” lmao

      • RCMaehl [Any]
        11·
        3 年前

        The bot that told users when all the numbers in their post added up to 69 / 420 as well.

  • Cybermass
    421·
    3 年前

    Love the bots no just reposting links to Reddit, I fucking hate that

  • RCMaehl [Any]
    351·
    3 年前

    Hi @[email protected] @[email protected],

    I’m planning on launching a service soon that will allow users to quickly and easily create+run lemmy bots similar to automod. I’ve posted about it on the Lemmy Matrix before, but is there a best place to contact you all to ensure that as I open pandora’s box, everyone is ready?

    • Astrealix
      121·
      3 年前

      Would love to know when such a thing is set up — been needing some bots for some things like match threads for a while on our c/gunners community

      • RCMaehl [Any]
        11·
        3 年前

        I’ll be making a post about it before the end of the month, although access to the service will be limited to moderators, instance admins, and curated users for a probably a year.

        • Astrealix
          5·
          3 年前

          can’t imagine people other than mods needing it ngl, so that’s totally fine by me haha — this is where i’d love to have a !remindme bot tho :p

          • RCMaehl [Any]
            6·
            3 年前

            Yes, but it’d be nice that if a user has an idea for a bot they can easily build it, test it, and share it (with community approvals). Also, there is a mastodon based remindme bot. It’s not specifically coded for Lemmy, but it’s compatible. Just mention @remindme@mstdn.social

      • Skyraptor7
        21·
        3 年前

        I am in the process of making on for R Reddevils. It’s using flash pre to get the data

        • Astrealix
          1·
          3 年前

          Yeah, we’ve seen your github! Taking a bit longer on our end, though.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate
      8·
      3 年前

      Seems like you could build in compliance with most of the rules (check the “bot account” box and put the owner’s name in the bio, etc.).

      • RCMaehl [Any]
        13·
        3 年前

        That was mostly the plan.

        Although, I’m definitely revising my post draft to account for these new requirements

  • shotgun_crab
    33·
    3 年前

    I think we should prioritize useful bots over funny bots. Funny bots are fine if they comment on rare occasions, like the one that tells you when all the words on your comment are in alphabetical order. Also, having bots that react to specific commands is better imo.

    • thessnake03
      9·
      3 年前

      One of my favorite reddit bots was mlbcompare. You’d input two (or more) baseball player names and it would compare stats. There were a bunch of other parameters you could feed it; 1st season, specific years, games on Tuesdays, etc. Very niche, but very cool

      • everythingsucks
        71·
        3 年前

        My favorite bot wasn’t a bot but was some guy who would comment “and my axe!”. I believe they were known as novelty accounts way back when.

        • tpyo
          3·
          3 年前

          Would give a Ben Shapiro quote that’s absolutely asinine when someone would mention his name (in subs the bot was allowed)

        • TheBatdeleted by creator
          3·
          2 个月前

          deleted by creator

    • Romdeleted by creator
      3·
      3 年前

      deleted by creator

    • problematicPanther
      41·
      3 年前

      I particularly enjoyed when the various gnu/linux explainer bots would interact with each other, or when people get fooled by the Petrosian bot on anarchy chess

    • Risus_Nex
      21·
      3 年前

      Are Bots certainly dumb enough for good helpful instruments?

    • Risus_Nex
      11·
      3 年前

      I need to test this alphabetical bot. Never heard of it.

  • dan1101English
    28·
    3 年前

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

    This one might be tough for people. But yeah these rules are very reasonable.

    • Virtual Insanity English
      1·
      3 年前

      Could be an issue for remind me bots, but that said a reminder bot could just PM a user…

      Speaking of PM… does such a thing exist in Lemmy yet?

      Edit… yes it does… guess reminder bots don’t need to be able to post… Or maybe they could be limited to one per OP with a clickable link for subsequent people to also get reminders?

      • ...English
        7·
        4 个月前

        deleted by creator

        • genshin_mirror_botBEnglish
          7·
          3 年前

          Noob question: How can you tell a bot is a bot? What am I looking for? A little B next to the username or something?

          Correct.

          It’s also a good idea to name bots something that makes the bot’s purpose obvious.

    • MrCennyOP
      25·
      3 年前

      That was actually a part of my draft, just didn’t copy it over. It’s added now. Thanks for the tip!

  • Synchromedeleted by creator
    282·
    3 年前

    deleted by creator

  • Machefideleted by creator
    271·
    2 年前

    deleted by creator

    • Risk
      1·
      3 年前

      I agree with the permission requirement being onerous on both mods and bot owners. Why not just let mods ban bots from their community when they pop up and decide they’re not appropriate?