downtide

The quickest way I actually did see someone get fired at my place was by posting racist shit on Facebook - on an account that was followed by many of his colleagues, including his manager. He was summarily dismissed at the start of his next shift.

Another one stole customers' credit card numbers, but that one ended up with a criminal record.

I think I'll remain agnostic on that one. Ask me again in 50 years and I'll probably know the answer by then. Unless I happen to somehow reach the age of 106 without dying, in which case I'll take a raincheck.

The Peak District is right on my doorstep (I'm near Manchester). Monsal Dale, near Little Longstone, is lovely. It was a regular place ofr my family to visit when I was a kid, and I still go up there sometimes. The walk along the river from there to Millers Dale is lovely. And there's a pub at Monsal dale viaduct (or at least, there was, not sure if it's still open).

More locally, I like the area around Uppermill, Diggle and Delph (north-east of Oldham). There's a great little riverside cafe caled the Lime Kiln, just north of Uppermill. It gets busy at weekends though.

A couple of weeks ago I went up to the Northumbria coast for a holiday. Warkworth, Alnwick, Bamburgh, Holy Island.... it's all beautiful around there.

I now fully understand why those cars keep exploding... 😂

It seems that this happens when you subscribe to a community on a different instance from your own. You can still read, post and interact exactly as if you were fully subscribed, you're just not counted in the number of subscribers. I've been told that you can force the system to subscribe you properly by repeatedly unsubbing and re-subbing, but I've had no luck with doing that so I just leave them alone now.

I think lemmings is the best one. Lemmings are cute.

I still use Flickr, but bear in mind that a free account can have a maximum of 1000 images. Its taken me about 7 years to hit the limit so I just delete older ones as I add new ones in.

yes, because no ads basically means my antivirus software has nothing to do. Creators have no choice over what ads are served up with the content and 99% of ads are loaded with malware whether you click on them or not.

Creators need to come up with better ways to monetise their content instead of relying on them.

Classic martini, dirty, with an olive.

No, not really. I used Reddit more for discussions on niche topics/subreddits and tend to particpate more in text posts than link posts. I was never on Reddit for news or politics and its the same here. I'm engaging in fewer discussions on Lemmy so far, simply because there are fewer of them here right now.

The trouble with any sort of captcha or test, is that it teaches the bots how to pass the test. Every time they fail, or guess correctly, that's a data-point for their own learning. By developing AI in the first place we've already ruined every hope we have of creating any kind of test to find them.

I used to moderate a fairly large forum that had a few thousand sign-ups every day. Every day, me and the team of mods would go through the new sign-ups, manually checking usernames and email addresses. The ones that were bots were usually really easy to spot. There would be sequences of names, both in the usernames and email addresses used, for example ChristineHarris913, ChristineHarris914, ChristineHarris915 etc. Another good tell was mixed-up ethnicities in the names: e.g ChristineHuang or ChinLaoHussain. 99% of them were from either China, India or Russia (they mostly don't seem to use VPNs, I guess they don't want to pay for them). We would just ban them all en-masse. Each account banned would get an automated email to say so. Legitimate people would of course reply to that email to complain, but in the two years I was a mod there, only a tiny handful ever did, and we would simply apologise and let them back in. A few bots slipped through the net but rarely more than 1 or 2 a day; those we banned as soon as they made their first spam post, but we caught most of them before that.

So, I think the key is a combination of the No-Captcha, which analyses your activity on the sign-up page, combined with an analysis of the chosen username and email address, and an IP check. But don't use it to stop the sign-up, let them in and then use it to decide whether or not to ban them.

Thank you!