Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word “bot”. Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin’s reported agent of “kbinBot”.
The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.
Edit:
Here are all the links that I’ve found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)
That assumes they were using an expression based filter in the webserver config itself. If they were extracting user agent strings containing the word “bot” from their webserver logs and adding them to a static list of user agents to deny (particularly if it’s an external file referenced by the config that strings can be easily dumped into), it’s a plausible explanation. I can especially see this happening if they did a blind sort by log volume and only inserted the 20 biggest results or somesuch.
Even if this was the case, was someone in a position to observe that one of those strings contained “kbin”? Yes. Was it possible they still didn’t notice? Yes, especially if shell pipelines are involved. Was it possible for someone to notice but assume that this wasn’t the kbin software itself, but a third-party tool that someone else wrote? Also yes. Still possible that all of this is bullshit? Still yes!
Full disclosure: I’ve worked in the webserver and webapp adjacent spaces for a long time, and I have a lot of appreciation for how much damage one person’s stupid change without peer review can do in massive production environments. :) I am admittedly biased toward applying Hanlon’s razor in these situations.