Lemmy Apps @lemmy.world ALostInquirer @lemm.ee 12mo ago

Is it possible for web UIs/apps to allow filtering bot posts without signing in?

I've looked through some of the web UIs and apps and found that I could hide NSFW posts without signing in, but so far I haven't found one that allows for hiding bot posts. Is that not possible at the moment?

I still haven't decided which UI or app to settle on, hence not signing in, and it's kind of revealing how many bot posts there are when viewing some Lemmy instances this way. 😅

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3 comments

I've tried programming a few greasemonkey scripts to do some things. So far I have a script that expands all posts (except NSFW), and makes all post links open in a new tab. So far they only work on old.lemmy.world. I've tried scripting the same thing to work on the default interface, but it seems to work quite differently.

If there's something in the post that makes bots obvious, it should be simple to find them, and then just make them not render. If you have a specific post you could point me to, I'd like to look into it.
- So far as I can tell, I think bot accounts are ideally supposed to flag their accounts as bot accounts, e.g. b0t here does so, which I'd think should allow for a similar toggle as exists for NSFW posts in different UIs/apps when not signed in, but I haven't seen it yet so I'm thinking it may work differently.
  
  a class="person-listing d-inline-flex align-items-baseline text-info" title="@bOt" href="/u/bOt"...../a
  
  I can probably modify the script to block these bots, because they all have the same username. I would just look for the title and remove the posts that equal @bOt.
  
  This might be a better task for the dev-team, because my method is definitely a work-around. There could already be an open issue for it on the github. I think we agree that blocking bots should be built into the API.