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)
If I have understood correctly they actually did block „kbinBot“. They did not use a regex like „*bot“ but have looked through the protocols and manually blocked each one that looked like a bot to them.
So the people using other variations of „bot“ would have had to catch exactly another blocked term for this and not just a fairly similar one.
I’m not saying there isn’t more to it, but what they wrote is within the realm of possibility.