shazbot

@shazbot@kbin.social

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Could blocked magazines no longer appear in Random Post and Random Thread sidebars? (kbin.social)

A lot of the larger abandoned magazines are just spam pools now. I don't see their posts in my feed, but I don't like that the two sidesbars of random posts and threads are now just spam advertising sidebars. I triedblocking the magazines, but doesn't that prevent the posts from showing in those sidebars....

shazbot,

A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:

Using KES, enable General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.

Next, enable General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.

shazbot,

If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.

shazbot,

Using this approach, I am seeing none of those posts on /science. I updated the filters a bit today. The top post is a legitimate article from 2024-04-13 and is by HeartyBeast.

Now, I understand that this is seen as an unnecessary step (too fancy) for some. People want zero ads out of the box without anything extra. So I'm thinking about the next approach here.

Framing the problem:

  • Filtering should be automatic
  • End-user wants zero additional setup
  • There is no active upstream development
  • It's not possible to inherit moderation of a magazine due to some queue of moderator application requests that is not being approved

The third point and fourth points are important here, since that's currently intractable. You can't reconcile zero additional setup with that.

But let's suppose becoming moderator of a defunct magazine (point 4) were possible while point 3 remained unresolved. In other words, at least moderators can try to pick up the pieces. Something being underestimated here is how annoying it would be for the moderator to manually cull posts every single day. I think you would have instant turnover after a couple of weeks once the tedium sets in. Manual solution is not good. Clearly, automation is needed on the moderation side.

So assuming you could actually inherit a magazine, but with no guarantee of upstream development, what about restructuring the tool above so that it's for moderators, instead of end-users? That's pretty easy, and I could make it something the moderator clicks once and it's done, auto-banning the posts. This is a pretty good method.

But you can't inherit moderation right now, so that's back to square one.

Realistically, that leaves these options at the moment:

  • Wait (a long time) and see
  • Use the tool above and make magazines readable, albeit at some sacrifice of convenience (?)
  • Migrate to another instance

Third approach is the path of least resistance and is best for most casual users. Second is for diehards who cannot move instances due to some personal or technical reason. First approach is the most annoying and eventually leads to the third approach after frustration sets in.

Pick your poison, I guess. I can't think of any other prophylactic approach at the moment, maybe this comment triggers some idea.

shazbot,

How do you typically update your KES?

shazbot,

I don't read magazines in-depth much either, so I wasn't aware of the extent of the issue at first, but I was appalled at what I saw. I agree with you that it creates a negative impression for anyone wanting to venture into or use a magazine. I know that needing KES upfront may be a non-starter for some people, but for me the difference with filtering is night and day now.

shazbot,

I understand if you don't want to add yet another third-party tool just to browse the site, but if you feel at all inclined, give it a try. For me 99% of magazines went from unusable to essentially clean.

shazbot, (edited )

If the script can automatically block any user whose post it suppresses, it would be awesome.

It does! I've reworded the OP to hopefully make that clearer. After using this approach for a few days, my blocklist (generated entirely programmatically) is ten pages long, and there is nary a bad post in sight. I'm expanding the filters on a daily basis.

I think the auto report function is severely needed; it's happening everywhere.

The idea is that it takes the burden off of myriad (N) users having to manually do this themselves, and lets a single user (the KES custodian) prepare the filters, which then propagate out to any user of KES. Instead of 1,000 people manually blocking, one person builds the heuristics, and everyone benefits.

Preventing this issue doesn't seem like a userscript issue...but I think the issue is that we need to get support top-down on this.

I understand, but the stated goal of KES is addressing issues that can't, or won't (due to some design conflict), be addressed, or which fall through the cracks. At the moment I'm seeing a lot of people voicing frustration, but due to the skeleton crew situation with administration of the site, it seems like screaming into the void. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and hopefully it gets some traction. But my job with KES is just to provide fixes for the end-user, albeit of a third-party nature.

shazbot,

Could you point me to some of the magazines where you feel this is particularly rampant right now?

shazbot,

You don't like bufo toad venom? I like to start my mornings by sipping a little bufo toad venom while reading kbin. Buy bufo toad venom today.

In all seriousness...I don't know if you saw my last thread about KES in this magazine, but I suggest giving it a try. I've extended the filter coverage based on your feedback, and those magazines should essentially be expunged of garbage for the time being.

As for the sidebar, I believe the implementation is fundamentally flawed because it loads content that, AFAIK, doesn't respect your actual block settings. I suggest disabling the random threads element altogether in KES by navigating to General > Hide sidebar elements.

shazbot,

Of course, I'm not trying to suggest that a third-party prophylactic tool is a definitive solution to what is ultimately a separate problem, just trying to be pragmatic here and restore basic readability for end-users, whether the filtering is done at the source or after the fact.

Let's be real here, we are talking about unmoderated magazines on an instance where the developer is AWOL and using a framework that is lacking many basic features. Even with moderators, manual moderation can be a big ask and is time-consuming for free volunteers, depending on the volume of posts or how rudimentary the moderation tools are.

I actually don't read kbin magazines much, so I wasn't aware of the extent of the problem until I started opening those magazines more closely, and felt that something is better than nothing.

On the magazines you mentioned, I do see a few anomalous patterns that I'll start filtering. For the most part, with filtering enabled, they were almost entirely free of garbage, save for a few patterns I may have missed on the first few passes. /programming and /food I need to take a deeper look at. The /food thing is good intel, because the use of Amazon referral links in the threads is something that can be generalized to other situations beyond books. Posting referral links is definitively block-worthy.

I also noticed some stuff that by any other name would be considered a thinly-veiled ad, such as specific users only posting articles to web sites they own and operate. I'm not talking about bots as such, but actively promoting one's own content--even when such content is on-topic for the magazine. I declined to filter this stuff yet, because it received a lot of upvotes and seemed to be received favorably, maybe because the readers felt it was at least germane to the topic at hand? I think this is probably true for /food as well, because the line between "content" and "promotion" is unclear here, since what is a food blog if not a product generating click revenue? It seems like the tolerance threshold for that sort of thing is higher in a magazine like /food versus some other magazine. Anyway, I digress. I'm not treating such stuff as in scope, just filtering what is blatantly noise.

shazbot,

@bayaz @insomniac_lemon

Yep, I meant to say /books when I was talking about Amazon links. Sorry.

As for the posts on /food, I have totally vanilla settings (no language filtering or anything) and I saw all of the posts you both mentioned.

Well, with the exception of the garbage posts, because in answer to lemon's earlier question, those have long since been scrubbed on the filter side. But they did exist before I started filtering.

All of that low hanging fruit kind of stuff has been banished, and I am mainly working on edge cases at this point.

shazbot,

I'll try to reproduce this and look into tightening the error handling. A 404 error should imply that the magazine is not available at the remote. Are those magazines available at the target instance? Agree that those should at least be added to the log--perhaps should add a third category for "Unavailable." Remember that it will also navigate you to the magazines list at the end for visual confirmation.

When you said community subscription, were you referring to something in particular, or just using this term generically to refer to magazines?

shazbot,

Hmm, this is a good finding. Just on a cursory review, I had a look at the magazines list on fedia, and it does list magazines with zero threads, comments, posts, or subscribers on them (on other instances other than kbin.social). So maybe you've discovered a problem with kbin.social's federation? I don't know too much about this issue, so this is just my initial reaction before looking into it further.

shazbot,

Looks like Safari's clipboard API doesn't function in the typical fashion, I will have to make some changes

shazbot,

I have made some modifications that should prompt you to click a button to copy the contents to the clipboard, rather than doing it automatically. This is done because Safari only permits modifying the clipboard if there was direct user interaction. Can you try again?

shazbot,

No, it does not. Could be added, in theory.

shazbot,

A bit late, but I saw your post and decided to make a tool for this. Hope this helps.

shazbot,

If using KES, check General > Add mail iconto append an icon/label next to a username to directly message them. (If on the same intance as you)

shazbot,

I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on a default kbin setup with KES either on off. The "always expand post bodies" feature of KES only applies to bodies, but I could extend it to support comments as well so that they auto-expand. What I didn't observe was any situations where the expansion bar obscures the text. Do you have a screenshot of that?

Are you running a custom theme?

shazbot, (edited )

Thanks for looking into this. I've been meaning to audit this mod, but was a bit busy this week. In light of this report, this seems like as good a time as any.

Unfortunately, the mod is no longer maintained by the original author, so I'll have to inherit it and refactor it. I feel it is overengineered for what it attempts to do, so it should be streamlined and the aforementioned issues fixed. I am also aware of the issue that the mod fails to unset itself properly when turned off. I am really not satisfied with its current functionality.

Root cause analysis and solutions are described in a subsequent comment

shazbot,

I understand the root cause now, will ping you again once this feature is working as expected.

shazbot, (edited )

@Pamasich @speck

I have completed an audit of the mod and observed the following issues:

  1. Does not properly unset classes and restore the page to an intact state when turned off: this was having the side effect of making the threaded lines look incorrect when toggling on/off in place. The mod should not leave dangling containers around after it is toggled off. The mod creates an outer container so that the "expando" lines flow all the way down through the child elements, but when turned off, these child elements need to be moved back out of the container to be adjacent to each other and the container removed. => Fixed locally.
  2. Does not properly unset event listeners attached to nested comments. Same as above, tends to leave dangling listeners and does not unset itself cleanly. => In progress.
  3. Because it physically manipulates the DOM and moves sub-comments into their own container down the tree, triggers an event (likely a bug) on Kbin's side whereby any time the DOM is updated for that element, Kbin appends a more element (text expansion button) if the text overflows a certain length, even if a more element is already present. You can test this by creating a dummy div above or below a long comment and then moving the long comment before or after that div. Simply moving its position in the DOM will trigger the creation of another more element inside. And because the mod puts each comment into its own container for the purposes of threading nested chains of comments, this will trigger the creation of as many mores as there are indendation levels. So for a comment chain 5 replies deep, there will be 5 mores. This is further exacerbated when toggling the mod on and off, since these mores are not getting wiped and will just keep getting stacked up. Since this is also an upstream issue, our only alternative here is to walk through the tree and remove the extraneous more elements after nesting occurs. This is similar to your CSS solution, but instead of masking them, physically deletes them, otherwise we will have a constantly growing tree of mores every time nesting happens. I guess this should also be reported upstream as well. Kbin seems to expect no DOM manipulation to occur, which is reasonable, I suppose, but might be better if the callback doesn't insert the more element at all if it's already present. => Easy fix on the Kbin side, in progress.
shazbot,

@Pamasich

I have resolved the aforementioned issues with a hotfix on the testing branch; please test when time permits. Executive summary:

  1. The mod fully restores the DOM tree to its original state when toggled off. It is now possible to toggle the mod on and off on the same page without reloading, and changes will behave as expected.
  2. For reasons of security, the mod no longer allows clicking the post headers or post body as a means of collapsing/expanding comments. This was attaching unnecessary listeners to elements on the page, with no way of clearing them when toggled off (besides hard refreshing). Now the only approved way of expanding/collapsing is to use the +/- icon or colored bars.
  3. The mod erroneously modified the CSS of profile pictures to give them rounded borders, which was unspecified by its intended behavior and documented nowhere in the description. Now they conform to the standard square format.
  4. The superfluous mores are being removed now for comments with overflow text. What I thought would be a quick fix turned into hours, and I thought I was losing my marbles over this one for a long time, since the tree clearly showed numerous duplicate mores, but only one per comment was being shown at runtime of the script. At first, I did not seriously think that the mod was completing its runtime cycle prior to the duplicate mores being spawned, but indeed this is what was happening. For now, I have added a 20ms sleep before clearing the extra mores, and this seems to suffice to let them propagate before the mod can continue with the cleanup phase. This seems satisfactory for now, short of attaching observers to wait for the duplicate mores to appear.

I believe that covers everything. It should be possible to switch the mod on and off at will now and see no adverse effect.

shazbot,

You're right, looks like I missed something that was obscured by custom styling.

And good catch on the mores appearing on teardown. This mod is turning out to be quite a beast. Thanks for testing.

shazbot,

I had just forgotten something simple (unload the threaded comments CSS):

Before:

removeDangling();
safeGM("removeStyle", "hide-defaults");

After:

removeDangling();
clearMores();
safeGM("removeStyle", "hide-defaults");
safeGM("removeStyle", "threaded-comments");

This is live on testing, but might take a sec to propagate due to GitHub's caching feature.

shazbot,

New KES mod?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • Hentai
  • doujinshi
  • announcements
  • general
  • All magazines
    •