I’m a software developer, and I’m currently noodling around with the idea of a small suite of software to help me moderate a couple communities. Right now, the features I’m thinking of are:

  • Lemmy bot integration - the suite would require a bot account.
  • Some kind of content moderation (detecting things like spam, bigotry, etc.) to flag for me to review. Similar to the mod queue on that other site.
  • Automatic removal of certain kinds of content. I figure this would be configurable, like you could choose whether your community is for text posts, for links, for videos, for pics, or some combination of everything.
  • Domain blacklists and whitelists.
  • Moderation record keeping - in other words, a database to keep track of bans, warnings, reports, etc.
  • Canned automatic messages, which would be useful to send when banning, unbanning, responding to certain types of queries, and so on. So if you use the software to ban someone, they automatically receive a notification about what they were banned for, and for how long.
  • Scheduled automatic posts, which would be configured with *.md files for content. Good for things like monthly meta threads.
  • Controls for the bot via JSON objects in private messages, which would direct it to follow commands.
  • Some kind of configurable user commands for the bot. (Haven’t really figured out what this would look like yet.)
  • A simple web interface for all of this.

That’s what I’m considering so far, but I’d love to get more ideas from the broader Lemmy community, and will post it on Github if it comes together.

The technology stack I’m considering is:

  • Node/Typescript
  • The lemmy-bot library
  • Sequelize for the database
  • Nest.js for the web backend
  • [TBD] for the web frontend (I hate React, so not that. Probably either Vue or Angular)
  • Docker for containerization

So what features would other Lemmy mods like to see in a Lemmy moderation suite like this?

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    I appreciate all of this perspective.

    I have never worked with angular, but I’ve seen many talks on it. Imo it feels really rigid, and like it’s not even js. I felt like when I interviewed candidates who had worked a lot with angular, they struggled to understand normal JavaScript and were fixated instead on how angular does things.

    I tried vue and simply hated it with my entire soul. The syntax is enragingly confusing for me. Also doesn’t feel like JavaScript.

    I was pretty resistant to react but I guess in the end, the flexibility it affords is why I don’t hate it. It feels like JavaScript. Have you tried next.js? I feel like it’s a big help with a lot of react’s pain points. Also typescript with next.js helps so much with the “stringed together mess” feeling you mentioned.