The rules for bots # Bots should be clearly prompted by a command # Bots that always post without human intervention are noisy and are often unwanted. Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first # Moderators should not have to chase down the bots being used in their community, it should be opt-in. Just ask, be nice. Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages # A bot’s response should be a small as possible to avoid taking space that could be used by people.

After some discussions in !chat, we came up with the conclusion we should adopt rules surrounding bots.

We’ll ban bots which we are aware of that currently don’t follow these rules and contact their creators. Please report bots that don’t follow these.

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hi there!

    I’ve been contacted regarding my @autotldr@lemmings.world bot. Currently it’s disabled for beehaw.org as can be seen here.

    I’d like to raise a discussion though as I think the bot is really useful.

    Here are some global all-time stats:

     ---------- --------- ----------- ------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------ 
  Comments   Upvotes   Downvotes   Negative comments count   Positive comments count   Neutral comments count  
 ---------- --------- ----------- ------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------ 
  430        3096      82          0                         429                       1                       
 ---------- --------- ----------- ------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------

    These are per-instance stats (I stripped other instances than yours). If I’m not mistaken, downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, so the like ratio doesn’t say much, but other numbers still could:

     -------------------- ---------- --------- ----------- ------------ --------------------- 
  Instance             Comments   Upvotes   Downvotes   Like ratio   Upvotes per comment  
 -------------------- ---------- --------- ----------- ------------ --------------------- 
  beehaw.org           28         236       0           100.00%      8.43

    Edit: The stats are generated by this - while it’s not the cleanest code I’ve ever written, I think it’s pretty readable and everyone can see that the stats are not some weird numbers to make it look better than it is.

    • Zoop@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m not sure how to properly tag a user to where they’ll definitely get a notification, so I wanted to reply directly to you to make sure you’ve seen the idea mentioned here in this comment about maybe wrapping the summaries in spoiler tags so that those who want to read it easily can and so that they don’t automatically take up so much space to scroll past on smaller screens and those that don’t want them maybe aren’t as bothered (for lack of being able to think of a better word to use here) by them.

      I do appreciate TL:DR; bots but/and I think the spoiler tags idea is a great idea and I would love to see it implemented, if you feel that’s something you’d like to do. :)

  • GeneralRetreat@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban based on the current requirements.

    If bots are going to be command triggered and require pre-approval by individual community moderators, I think it would be prudent to include an index of registered bots + commands in the community info pages.

    Currently I can’t think of any reasonable way for a Beehaw user to know which bots are operational and what their commands are. If bots need to be command triggered but there’s no way to find out which ones are functional, why approve them to begin with?

    • abhibeckert@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’d just suggest that this is a defacto ban based on the current requirements.

      To be honest, I’m OK with that. If I want a bot to summarise an article, I’ll go to ChatGPT or use Bing Chat. I don’t come to BeeHaw to interact with a bot. I’m here to interact with humans and in my opinion it should be a human that decides to post a link to an article and that human should also summarise it. They will do a better job than even the best bot.

      While I’m not outright opposed to bots, I have yet to see a bot on Lemmy or Reddit that actually added value to the community. Usually every bot I encounter gets blocked the first time I see it.

      Unfortunately a lot of bots on Lemmy that’s not really an option, for example a bot that finds interesting articles and posts them on Lemmy… I don’t want to see those posts, but at the same time I might want to see the discussion around the article. So I can’t block it.

    • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.orgOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      We could put all of the bot commands on them on the page for bots. That said, I expect many people will see one person doing it and copy that behaviour.