Died a few months ago when ESPN stopped responding to the queries the bot made. I probably got some time to maybe fix it next week

I'll copy the answer I provided in the main thread over on !meta@programming.dev, but to also add, the tool does not monitor all users. It only monitors newly created user accounts on programming.dev for x amount of time so that we know that the account isn't being made to abuse or spam. We do not want to have this tool monitoring regular users.

Copied reply about why DM monitoring is needed:

From the PR standpoint, I don't think it's worth it, and it'd be better to just leave it on reports.

The problem is that we can't rely on reports of DMs since lemmy doesn't federate them to us.

E.g.
-> troll@programming.dev makes a new account and sends harassment to victim@lemmy.instance
-> victim@lemmy.instance reports the DMs from troll@programming.dev
-> We, the admins of programming.dev, do not see this report because lemmy does not federate the DM report and troll@programming.dev can continue harassing others because we never find out about it.

This isn't just a theoretical, it happened just last month that one of our users (1 day old account) sent rape and death threats (which were reported), and we found out about it by pure chance when talking to admins from the other instance.

And just to clarify, the tool only automatically monitors new accounts, i.e. accounts that are being registered today. If you account is more than a few weeks old, the tool doesn't monitor any of your activity.

The instance has experienced a lot of trolls signing up recently, so we need to moderate new accounts more strictly. The automated removal is needed to respond quickly to potential harassment. The comment was restored after manual review.

The bot is up and running again

Yeah, we ban the spam accounts on the first report we receive.

Does this instance have a concrete guideline or precedent for that or would be able to decide at the discretion of an admin?

Communities with no connection to programming culture are removed as a general rule. Other than that, it's decided on a case by case basis. It's not that uncommon for us to remove new communities that are created. We've removed the community + one another

That should actually work great, in the absence of being part of the API, thanks! Funnily enough the copilot autocomplete suggested that when I was formatting the url param.

The person has previously been warned to stopped posting links to the site. They've now been given a temp ban, if that doesn't deter them, they'll be given a permanent ban and we might ban the site from our instance.

Depends on the file, very simple files may only warrant npp, but VSCode for more complex stuff where live preview may come in handy.

comment_count - old_count after a moderator deleted some comments would be my bet.

"Sleek"

It looks monstrous, like it's designed for mowing down pedestrians instead of getting people from A to B.

Those neat little python libraries that makes it go really fast is written in C. It's a neat little trick to have up your sleeve if you want to take your python profencie to the next level.