Hello everyone,

I am one of the moderators of [email protected]. We use a bot relying on https://schedule.lemmings.world/ to create a post every day automatically.

I know that some users block bots because they consider them annoying, be it repost posts or features bots such as tldr or piped. Having the bot labelled as such prevents the daily threads from being viewed by users who might be interested.

I had that reasoning in the past, but had the bot banned for not complying with the instance guidelines.

I thus open this thread to see what could be done to solve this issue. Could there be exceptions to the bot labelling guidelines in this kind of cases?

  • Rusty Raven
    1·
    1 year ago

    It would be nice if you could have more than one category of bot. There is a huge difference between a bot which makes regular posts like daily threads which are part of the organisational structure of a group and bots which crawl through content to make replies, reposts etc. Even just a difference between general bots and ones which are also moderators of the group would help.

    I chose to not label the bot I use to create daily posts, not because I want to stop people being able to filter it out (if they want to they can just block the bot easily enough), but because I don’t want to remove the ability of people in my group to filter other bots. Given that the group consists almost entirely of chat in automatically posted daily threads by marking the bot as a bot I would be effectively forcing people to chose between participating in the group and blocking more general bots.