This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I’m just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.
Glad we got to the bottom of this! And yeah, just to confirm, I see no changes on my side.
However, I’m surprised to still see my posts there. I would have thought you deleting them on your instance would propagate out to my instance.
Well, I purged them from the database. Maybe if I had removed the post instead of purging, that would have propagated. Right now the posts don’t exist in our database at all.
But I bet the more likely scenario is that once a post gets propagated, it persists forever on the instance it gets propagated to unless someone purges it there.
Ahh, I’m actually guessing it’s because you purged it. I think purges are local, but deleting it is considered a moderation action and is therefore propagated out. I just checked the modlog and clicked on a random post that was removed on a different instance. When I went to the post, I could still see it, but there was a notification at the top that said “Removed by Moderator”.
Excellent! This is good to know! I bet other users who aren’t admins/mods can’t see the post at all when it’s removed. I’ll avoid purging from now on.
Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s how this works. I opened the post in an incognito window, but still on my instance, and got an error message instead of the post.