Programming.dev finally got official administration guidelines. This document codifies what has up until now only been loosely discussed topics throughout the year in the private administration chat channels.

We hope that by putting the guidelines into writing and making them public, we can ensure a consistent level of moderation by the administration team. But also more importantly, let everyone know by what guidelines and metrics the administration team should follow, making it easier for you guys to hold us accountable and report any instances of an administrator overstepping their role, or decisions you disagree with.

While the primary focus of the document is aimed at administrators specifically, it also includes information to users on how they can contact the admin team if they want to report another admin for deviating from our guidelines.

As always, feedback is more than welcome and we would be happy to discuss any thoughts you may have on our guidelines, nothing is ever perfect.

Programming.dev now has official community guidelines. These should help clarify what sort of local communities we allow to be hosted on the instance and the rules we expect them to follow.

As most programmers are aware, anticipating every edge case is generally not viable, so these are just guidelines, not written-in-stone rules. The admin team will still evaluate communities on a case-by-case basis, and exceptions are always possible.

If you have any feedback on the guidelines, we are more than happy to hear them, so please post them below.

As a follow up to our previous announcement post, we have now set up a page to display every community that is hidden for our local users.

As explained on that page:

Programming.dev will hide political communities, NSFW/pornographic communities and communities that have a majority of their content produced by bots. While a community is hidden, it and its posts and comments will not show up in post feeds or in the search results unless you have explicitly subscribed to it. Communities themselves currently do not show up in community search results, this may change in the future; see #2943.

Users can subscribe to a hidden community to remove the hidden effect status of a community, however it can be difficult for a user to find out which communities are due to them not being searchable.

As per our policy of hiding political communities, pornographic communities and communities hosting bot spam, [email protected] is now set to hidden as its content is mainly USA centric political news.

Those of you who want to continue to see posts from [email protected] are encouraged to subscribe to the community, which will make the it visible for your account.

The mods over [email protected] have already been notified of this move and understand our decision, please do not bother them by pinging them here.

A previous announcement post of other hidden communities can be seen here

We have over a period of time gotten repeated reports of unmarked NSFW posts in certain communities. All of these communities share the same singular mod, who have shown indifference when content has been reported. As leaving NSFW posts unmarked is against our instance rules, we have moved to set the rule-breaking communities to hidden.

Those of you who subscribe to hidden communities will continue to see them as normal, for everyone else these communities will look empty and hidden from c/all.

The newly hidden communities are:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that programming.dev's policy is to by default hide political communities, pornographic communities and communities hosting bot spam. Users seeking such content can subscribe to hidden communities so see them as normal.

Just recently we also went ahead and hid communities from lemmygrad due to the politics clause.

As always we encourage our local users to report content that break our instance rules. All content you report are seen by the admin team and helps inform the team of what's going on across the fediverse.

Sorry if this is the wrong community, not sure where else to post the question, and I'd rather avoid creating an issue over on Github.

Is there a way to check if a federated user is an administrator via the API? .get_person_details() will have the admin field set to false for all other than local admins and .get_community() only reveals the list of moderators.

I know I could scrape the admin list from the main page html, but scraping html is prone to errors if an instance uses an alternative frontend or the frontend is updated. Getting the data via the API should be a more stable solution.

Based on #3703 it seems like a decent chance that this information isn't currently exposed to federated instances though?

Describe the problem

3/4 moderators of the community are inactive, leading to a backlog of unresolved reports from the community.

Suggested solution

Find 1-2 active programming.dev users in the community volunteering to moderate c/programmer_humor in the comments of this post.

Expected time cost

A few minutes each week, the volume of the reports from the community is currently low.

Temporary solution

The community will be moderated by the admin community team until new moderators are found.

This weeks federated community of the week is gaming! This is a community for news, discussions and memes related to games

Top Posts

• Get gud
• 2 way communication is key
• https://programming.dev/post/6670376

[email protected]

This weeks community of the week is machine learning! Machine learning is the science of computer algorithms that help machines learn and improve from data analysis without explicit programming.

Top Posts

• Japan determines copyright doesn't apply to LLM/ML training data
• Real World Data Science Competition | When will the cherry trees bloom?
• Dark Visitors - A list of known AI agents on the internet

[email protected]

This weeks federated community of the week is retroNET! This is a community to discuss websites, software, games, fads, memes, or any general happenings that used to occur or had originated on computers 20+ years ago.

Top Posts

• Blockbuster Gumball Machine $10 at neighbor's garage sale
• Archive.org has thousands of old software/games emulated right in your browser
• Having trouble sleeping?

[email protected]

This weeks community of the week is comics! This is a community to share and discuss any comics related to programming (xkcd, monkeyuser, wizard zines, etc.)

Top Posts

• [Toggl Good Squad] IT Jobs explained with a broken lightbulb
• [xkcd] Movie Seating (20 Oct 2006)
• [xkcd] Random Number (9 Nov 2007)

[email protected]