Hi,

My instance has been running for a day or so. In that time, three users have randomly shown up on my admin panel as Banned. There are no pending applications. What exactly are those users doing?

My first instinct was it was an issue with emails and signup as I didn’t have email working properly at first, so I unbanned all three users. 🤷‍♂️

Was that a mistake? What does it mean? What could be causing it?

  • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
    4·
    1 year ago

    I remember reading somewhere that bans are federated, if you have a look in the instance modlog (bottom of every page?) you should find out who banned that user, why they were banned, and which instance they were banned from

    I don’t run a lemmy instance (yet?) so this is just based on looking at existing discussions

  • PriorProject@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Check https://hakbox.social/modlog while logged in as admin. You ought to be able to see who is executing moderation actions there.

    I don’t know a lot about moderation/admin, but I believe mod actions federate around the network, at least by default. So probably an admin or community mod on an instance you federate with blocked those users and the ban federated to your instance.

    • Slashzero@hakbox.socialOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yes, I see that now! Interesting, that is really cool actually that the ban action is federated! So, if a user is banned on one instance, they are banned everywhere?

      I guess I should re-ban the 3 I unbanned?

      • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
        4·
        1 year ago

        The ban will only federate out if they’re banned from the instance they registered on - their home instance.

        i.e. if badfaith@lemmy.ml is banned from beehaw.org, nothing would propogate out because they’re just banned from that instance.

        However, if badfaith@lemmy.ml was banned from lemmy.ml, they can’t log in anymore - they’ve been banned from their home instance, so they can’t interact with any communities. That ban will federate.

        Unbanning them from your instance won’t make a difference either way. Because they can’t log in to their own instance, your unbanning will have no effect.

        • Slashzero@hakbox.socialOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Perfect explanation. Thank you for that.

          Something still kind of feels buggy about the observed behavior though. Users I have never heard about suddenly show up on my instance as banned? With so many people spinning up instances and the number of communities and users growing (almost exponentially right now apparently,) the admin page “banned user” section could quickly become unwieldy…

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
    1·
    1 year ago

    You can check the modlog (at the bottom of the UI you’ll finde the link), most probably those were banned in another instance.
    It is weird they show up in our own instances as banned, not sure what happens when you unban them.

    • Slashzero@hakbox.socialOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I don’t know either, but I “re-banned” them on my instance with a comment of why they were previously banned and by who.

      I would think that even if the ban audit log shows up on our individual instances, we would not be able to unban them on the other instance as we aren’t admins there. I also don’t think the ban on one instance would carry over to other instances, but I don’t know enough about lemmy to know for sure.

      This feels like a display bug in the lemmy-ui, where it’s showing the audit / ban log for all instances as if they were on your instance.