IIRC the official reason was that some automated anti-spam code accidentally caught the kbin user agent and mistakenly added it to a block list, and the lemmy.ml admins were busy and didn't see it for over a week - but once one of them noticed it was promptly fixed.
Also, I recall this being specific to lemmy.ml - other instances run by other admins like lemmy.world and lemmy.ca weren't affected.
Following. Would love to get some peertube recommendations.
Related, https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/442117/Is-there-a-way-to-report-an-individual-user - a good workaround in the comments there
Thank you @ernest for all you do and all you have done!
Absolutely do not want to see you run yourself into the ground over kbin matters, your family and your health come first.
I don't question your judgement, but I think the "step down" bit is a bit extreme, even if you fail to meet the deadline. Worst case, maybe let the community appoint a second-in-command temporarily to get some things moving along while you take a well deserved break?
If you check out the modlog, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/modlog you can see that @Shortcake last did some moderation activity six days ago, deleting and blocking stuff from federated user imona at kbin.melroy.org
I think the admins like @ernest wouldn't do anything at this point, since the mod reappeared somewhat recently to reclaim the mantle. Instead, we need to figure out how to reach out to Shortcake and figure out how to get moderation more active here again.
Hopefully they just haven’t thought about that yet
I'm actually happy to give a vote of confidence in @Shortcake who did a great job moderating this magazine in the beginning.
If that individual would just return to checking this magazine more frequently, I'm happy to leave things as-is.
But if that's not possible, hopefully Shortcake will appoint someone as a third mod soon so this magazine can get cleaned up. (Speak of - any volunteers?)
Actually, @Shortcake got back to me two days ago and took care of the spam - or so we thought. I'm sending another message now since we're getting more spam.
I'm wondering if an email was sent out as part of the updates that @ernest and @admin are doing to kbin, which might have grabbed the mods attention here. The lack of email notifications makes it hard to keep up, I'm thinking.
I was hoping that perhaps the folks behind @admin could help out here as a stopgap measure (at least to clean up spam in unmodded magazines) - but then I realized that the admin hasn't been online in over a month :/
A lot of spam seems to be coming from one-off instances via federation. Makes it easier to stop (the admins can just defederate once an instance is identified as a spammer w/o having to get into the tricky question of getting involved with the moderation of other magazines) but it also means new user restrictions aren't enough by themselves.
David Weber’s Honorverse and Mother of Demons by Eric Flint both come to mind. There is also the Little Fuzzy series by H. Beam Piper.
Edit: Also, The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Honorable mention also to Dragons Egg by Robert L. Forward (humans start out more advanced in the beginning but get surpassed) and the Uplift Storm trilogy omnibus (or books 4-6) from David Brin (humans aren’t the most advanced in the entire universe but are in the planet that the stories take place on).
The one thing I never understood is why did the Oliver subs go back to normal instead of sticking with Oliver. Finally, interest was lost in the Oliver jokes and traffic was going down. So it would have been the perfect time to enforce Oliver and cut into the ads traffic that way. News articles at the time didn't show any indication that this was another moved forced by reddit admins so why did the mods seemingly cave in without cause?