KES is the Kbin Enhancement Suite, a userscript/extension for (k/m)bin that provides a variety of customizable tools for users.
The last minor version included an initial attempt at a spam filter. This was chiefly done to address the low-hanging fruit of spam and scrub the most persistent pharma ads, etc. The approach was similar to that used by Ublock Origin or Steven Black's hosts file, in that it was a monolithic list of filter rules.
This was alright as a stopgap measure, but to the surprise of no one, the types of spam that continued to appear were innumerable in variety.
In an effort to have some filtering rather than none, the feature also went against the KES dictum about giving users choice to tweak their own settings: it was an all-or-nothing filter.
This update introduces v2 of spam filtering. The old logic has been retired, but may make a comeback at some point. A new sidebar page titled "Spam" has been added, and this will be a central place for anti-spam features.
The first of these efforts is a new filter that exposes the following options:
- Hide posts from very new accounts
Users commented that there is no "gating" mechanism with registration, causing bogus accounts to be constantly recreated as a form of ban evasion. If you find that very new accounts have a high tendency to be spam, you can tick this setting to remove posts from very new users from the feed.
This does not block the user outright, merely hiding the post. This effectively gives some "break-in" time for the user to prove themselves. After a certain threshold, the user will fall outside of the "new account" window; if they continue to engage in spam-like behavior at that time, they should be caught by the other ban filters below.
- Hide posts with abnormally low relative rank
Users with aggregate posting activity that does not necessarily resemble spam at first glance, but which periodically post spam/off-topic/controversial threads in the wrong communities, have a high likelihood of being astroturfers. This option hides such posts from the feed if the relative vote weight is egregiously outside the norm. Like the above, it does not block them outright.
- Block users with spam-like activity
This feature blocks users outright if they engage in spam, mass posting, and other robotic behavior. It is less permissive than v1 of the spam filters, which failed to catch a lot of spam that was not explicitly blacklisted in the filter list. This new approach is more generic and does need constant updating of the spam filters.
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By default, all three options are enabled. I find this combination gives the best results so far. Note that infinite scrolling should be enabled for best results, and it may take a little while when navigating to a magazine for the results to be filtered.
Give it a try and see if this negates the spam issue or improves your experience. What other filter options would you like to see added?
The remainder of the changelog follows:
Add-ons ----------
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Filter advertisements (@shazbot)
Location: Spam > Filter advertisements
Updated filtering logic to v2, as described in the preamble of this post.
Collapse pinned posts (@shazbot)
Location: Threads > Collapse pinned posts
This simple feature groups together pinned posts on the magazine index and collapses them by default. Click the toggle area at the top of the magazine index to expand pinned posts. This is especially useful on magazines with many pinned posts that are not regularly archived, such as /m/kbinmeta.
API ----------
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Added the helper function isThread() to the API. This returns true if the current window location is a thread inside of a magazine. This can be used to abort if the feature is intended to only apply on the thread index. In the future, a more expanded function will be provided that returns the type of page from a list of enums.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you point me to some of the magazines where you feel this is particularly rampant right now?
How do you typically update your KES?
The blurb below is excerpted verbatim from the release notes. For the full release notes, see here.
Repository: KES
Many of you are aware of the "canned meat" problem on kbin.social, with some magazines being inundanted with garbage posts.
The latest version of KES ships with an experimental new feature you can enable that attemps to filter these posts and block the users who posted them based on certain heuristics.
This feature is experimental, but I see a lot of users voicing frustration at the problem, so now seems like a good time to start collecting feedback. You can start using this feature immediately and it should not have any adverse effects, but its coverage is still being expanded.
You can find it under General > Filter advertisements. For best results, it should be used in conjunction with infinite scrolling enabled in the kbin sidebar, so that new content is loaded in as posts are removed.
As you navigate through a magazine, KES will remove offending posts from the index and then permanently block the user of the post. This feature is also preventive, as variations of posts made under different usernames will continue to be flagged. The goal is to avoid the tedious process of "whack-a-mole" and cull these posts without manual intervention.
Initially, KES will be removing posts from the index, but as it builds your blocklist up for you, such posts will stop appearing in the thread index altogether, and you should see the overall signal to noise ratio improving. Outside of your blocklist, subsequent posts that meet certain criteria will continue to be culled regardless or when or where they appear.
I am currently using /m/science and /m/opensource as a control. If you navigate to those magazines and compare the results before and after enabling this feature, the difference should be clear. After enabling the feature and scrolling all the way back to 2023, there should be few if any unsolicited ads on the page.
Hopefully this improves readability and encourages participation in communities that otherwise seemed impenetrable at first glance. In fact, once you scrub the garbage posts, you'll be surprised to find that there are legitimate posts being made fairly frequently in these seemingly "dead" communities--the posts were just buried in the heap.
However, canned meat comes in a lot of different flavors, and each magazine has slightly different permutations. The coverage in this initial version is not exhaustive, but it attempts to be thorough. This should greatly cut down on the most annoying ads. If there are specific (most likely unmoderated) magazines you are still having a problem with, please leave a comment listing the magazine. You don't need to point to specific posts or users; the magazine name is enough here for me to analyze what kinds of posts are appearing.
Some additional notes:
- For the time being, this feature does not report the post to the magazine's moderator (usually nonexistent). By kbin's design, a post can only be reported at most by a single user, so this seemed like a reduplication of efforts to me. But auto-report can be added if necessary.
- This feature works on any instance, but is chiefly designed for kbin.social and is probably unnecessary elsewhere.
- I have not taken a look at microblogs yet, so I don't know if this problem is happening there, too (please let me know). For now, this works on the thread index of magazines.
- For best results (if you want to quickly bootstrap your blocklist), I suggest enabling the feature and scrolling through an affected magazine for awhile with infinite scroll on to build up the blocklist as new posts load in, then refreshing the page if necessary.
- The "random threads" sidebar is fundamentally flawed because it shows content even if you've already blocked it. So I recommend enabling
General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threadsin conjunction with this feature.
Addressing your issue, I have bumped the version number to 0.1.3 and made a change to the async method handling so that instances not available at the remote get added to the fail log correctly.
This doesn't explicitly address the fact that some instances are unfederated, but it will make the log results clean.
As for the federation issue, what I've initially found is that a user on an instance has to visit the remote instance for the home instance to be aware of this remote instance, and a user (could be a different user) has to subscribe to that instance for the posts to start federating. What is unclear is how a user on an instance visits a remote instance from the home instance, as this is implementation-specific and could vary from instanc to instance.
KES is the Kbin Enhancement Suite.
This is just an update to note that the tool has undergone a total quality audit to ensure that all of its add-ons support both kbin and mbin instances and behave in an expected fashion regardless of which instance type you are using.
If you had previously tried KES on an mbin-type instance and encountered anomalous behavior, you should now find that it has full compatibility.
The full release notes can be found here
No, it does not. Could be added, in theory.
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?
Looks like Safari's clipboard API doesn't function in the typical fashion, I will have to make some changes
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.
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?
A bit late, but I saw your post and decided to make a tool for this. Hope this helps.
"EXIT" -- Export Across Instances Tool
This is a simple and self-contained tool that helps automate the process of exporting your magazine subscriptions from one instance to another, provided you have accounts on both.
Could also be used to copy subscriptions from one named account to another named account on the same instance, or to back them up for later.
Instructions and tool available here
Code runs locally in your browser only.
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)
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.
Original 1.0.0 release post here
Thanks to your detailed bug reports and the tireless efforts of our contributors, KES has undergone significant stability changes and has been upgraded with a more robust API framework to support the different flavors of GreaseMonkey, TamperMonkey, ViolentMonkey, etc.
If you had tried the previous version but could not get it working on GreaseMonkey/iOS, now is the time to try again.
In addition, this version brings a host of usability improvements, as well as a few new mods. Notably, this includes the Notifications Panel by @blobcat, which was highly asked for.
With this stability brush-up, this release paves the way for a stable foundation we can start adding many more mods to. If there is one you would like to see included, feel to drop a request here.
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Notable feature additions:
- Notifier on wrench icon if updates to KES are available
- Transparent Mode: click the icon to see behind the KES menu and check changes on the page; click again to return
- Reset button: clear all saved KES settings and reset
- Clipboard button: copy system information to clipboard (used when submitting bug reports)
- Notifications Panel (@blobcat): adds a navbar bell icon that opens notifications in an iframe
- Bug-report-from-post: post contents of a message directly to the KES bug tracker
- Display total number of add-ons enabled in header
Existing users: The latest release is available through the install update button on KES, or through your extension manager.
New users: The latest release is available here. If you are a new user, see the docs for additional information and usage guides.
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Mod authors:
This release ships with safeGM(), a shim which handles cross compatibility between the different GM APIs.
You can call this shim by passing it standard GM_ or GM. (4.0) commands without the prefix and pass the usual arguments.
A detailed explanation of this and other new utility functions is available here
There is also better support for fields like reset buttons, ranges (sliders), and number inputs. Now you can prompt users for a numerical input or tweak the value of a setting, or revert them to their initial values.
A total rewrite of the documentation now includes integration examples, sample code, and discussion of how KES handles mutation observer events for you. This should make it even easier than before to port your scripts.
If you would like to contribute more actively to the development of KES, be it through testing, graphics, administrative issues, or code contributions, please feel free to reach out.
Contribute to aclist/kbin-css development by creating an account on GitHub.
Hello, this is a client-side theme focused on high readability and removing extraneous visual widgets and icons. It is based on the way I liked to read content on that "other site."
For better or worse, the current kbin layout is very "mobile" in design and not the best for reading longform text on a desktop. This theme focuses on easing the layout and hopefully making threads look more forumlike.
It does take a "scorched earth" approach in removing stuff I don't like, but everything that starts disabled can be enabled again via the radio buttons provided, allowing you to toggle on/off various widgets on the fly.
This includes:
- sidebar
- footer
- activity
- thumbnails
- previews
- short description
- avatars
- upvotes, downvotes, or both
- icons
- elements of the text submission form
- numerous other elements
In addition, you can change the base color scheme via the color picker in order to globally control things like:
- body color
- link colors
- upvote/downvote colors
- blockquotes, code blocks, input fields
- hover/focus color
- text color
- etc.
Disclaimer: I have tested this at 1440P on a desktop environment at various scaling levels and dimensions and it seems to mostly be OK. I have not extensively checked for glitches on mobile aside from some rudimentary mocking. If you find something wrong, feel free to make a PR or inbox me.
Frontend is not my main focus area, so there may be some anti-patterns or things that are objectively stupid, particularly around the way I manipulated elements on the grid. Again, if something is being implemented wrongly here, please advise.