Hi everyone,

News is weird. When it's weird enough, it reads like articles from The Onion, and that's what we're all about. But as the community grows, there's more and more content being posted here that just isn't very Onion-y.

Jimmy Carter Becomes Second President Convicted Of Felony For Sticking Up Waffle House

Take a look at that headline from The Onion today. Or this one:

World Series Of Poker Entrants Play One Hand Face-Up So Everyone Can Learn Rules

Or this one:

New Hormone-Free IUD Wards Off Sperm With Steady Emission Of Police-Grade Pepper Spray

That's the flavor we're going for. We want real, credible news articles with headlines that read like they're from The Onion.

This is not the community for:

• Non-Onion-y political news (it's gotta be absurd enough to look Onion-y)
• Non-Onion-y regular news (it's gotta be absurd enough to look Onion-y)
• Satire (it's gotta be actual news)
• Fake news from fly-by-night "news" sites (again, it's gotta be actual news)

That means not every ridiculous thing a politician does qualifies as appropriate content here.

I need your help, though... I need people to report content that just isn't Onion-y, and I need people to try not to post non-Onion-y content in the first place.

Finally, I need help moderating, so this is also a formal call for new mods! Post below if you think you're ready to take on moderation for one of the larger Lemmy communities! Tell me why you'd like to mod, and link to a news story from any time (it doesn't have to be current) that has a properly Onion-y headline, to show that you really get this community.

I'll pick two people to become new moderators for the community from participants. Good luck!

I've just finally contracted it for the first time. I'm vaxxed and multiple-times-boosted, so it's not that bad...

But it's still pretty fucking miserable. Ugh. The paxlovid seems to be helping some, but in return it's giving me the most horrendous taste in my mouth. Like a battery fucked a lemon in there.

What worked for you when you caught it, lemmings?

Edit: Holy cats, you guys came through! Thank you all for your various recommendations. The gist of it seems to be:

• Definitely stay on the paxlovid (and use pineapple to deal with the awful taste in my mouth that's a side-effect).
• Rest. Fucking REST! Do not, under any circumstances, stop resting until it's run its course. (Fortunately already doing that, since I've been feeling half-past dead.)
• Ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and mucinex are my dear, sweet friends. (I'm already a big fan of mucinex, so I have some already.)
• Drink a lot of water. (I have a comically oversized cup I've been using for that.)

And I gotta say... Now, as the end of the day approaches, I think I might, just maybe, be feeling a tad better. Thank you all!

President Joe Biden said Tuesday Israel’s prime minister needs to change his hardline government and support for the country’s military campaign is waning amid heavy bombardment of Gaza. ... “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” Biden said, adding that the Israeli government “doesn’t want a two-state solution.”

It's mind-blowing how thoroughly Netanyahu has bungled this. They had damn near the entire world in full support after Hamas' horrific attack on Israeli civilians, and they've managed to lose it.

We've been getting some weird posts lately that... Well, they're not making me think it's gotta be an Onion headline, that's for sure.

So just a little refresher. Posts should be:

1. Links to news stories from…
2. …credible sources, with…
3. …their original headlines, that…
4. …would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

If it's not Onion-y, it doesn't belong here. Bizarre, horrific, and violent news can be here if the headline reads like something out of The Onion, but if it doesn't, it's going away. And if there's too much non-Onion-like content from an account, that account is going away, too.

If you're not sure whether the real news headline you've found is like The Onion, here's a few sample Onion headlines from today:

• "Visiting Friend Pleasantly Surprised By City’s Open Hostility Toward Homeless People"
• "Increasingly Powerful Trans Person Capable Of Using Every Single Bathroom At Once"
• "Man Feels Like Bystanders Are Arguing For Him To Put Gun Down In Bad Faith"
• "Wally The Emotional Support Alligator Went To See The Phillies"
• ‘New York Times’ Issues Apology For Reporting Palestinian Deaths

See? Find headlines from real news outlets that remind you of headlines like those. And just to prove my point: One of them is real.

Up until now, I've only gotten the Pfizer vaccines. And while I've reacted to them, it was never particularly bad. Light muscle aches and some fatigue were basically it. Worst was the second one - I could feel my hair follicles and eyelids with that one.

But the Moderna one seems to be quite the beast.

When I found out I could get the new Moderna, I was excited, since I've heard that mix-and-match is probably the strongest immunity you can get. And I figured it wasn't going to be that bad when after several hours, I only had some light fatigue.

But today has been awful. Consistent fever around 102.3, chills, headache, nausea, whole-body aches, and ludicrous levels of exhaustion. I've been utterly useless.

Is this what Moderna vaccines have been like all along? I'll take it over contracting COVID-19, definitely... but ouch. It's hurting me plenty.

Next morning update: Chills are gone, fever seems to be gone, muscle aches aren't entirely gone, but they're fading. All in all, 10/10 would feel like shit for a day again to help stop the spread of a dangerous disease.

Right now to delete a post I need to use the website. I'd love to have better mod tooling in this app.

I'm a software developer, and I'm currently noodling around with the idea of a small suite of software to help me moderate a couple communities. Right now, the features I'm thinking of are:

• Lemmy bot integration - the suite would require a bot account.
• Some kind of content moderation (detecting things like spam, bigotry, etc.) to flag for me to review. Similar to the mod queue on that other site.
• Automatic removal of certain kinds of content. I figure this would be configurable, like you could choose whether your community is for text posts, for links, for videos, for pics, or some combination of everything.
• Domain blacklists and whitelists.
• Moderation record keeping - in other words, a database to keep track of bans, warnings, reports, etc.
• Canned automatic messages, which would be useful to send when banning, unbanning, responding to certain types of queries, and so on. So if you use the software to ban someone, they automatically receive a notification about what they were banned for, and for how long.
• Scheduled automatic posts, which would be configured with *.md files for content. Good for things like monthly meta threads.
• Controls for the bot via JSON objects in private messages, which would direct it to follow commands.
• Some kind of configurable user commands for the bot. (Haven't really figured out what this would look like yet.)
• A simple web interface for all of this.

That's what I'm considering so far, but I'd love to get more ideas from the broader Lemmy community, and will post it on Github if it comes together.

The technology stack I'm considering is:

• Node/Typescript
• The lemmy-bot library
• Sequelize for the database
• Nest.js for the web backend
• [TBD] for the web frontend (I hate React, so not that. Probably either Vue or Angular)
• Docker for containerization

So what features would other Lemmy mods like to see in a Lemmy moderation suite like this?

Edit: OK, I've had a chance to take a look at the code for the existing Lemmy "automoderator" bot that's in progress, and I think I'm still leaning towards working on one of my own, partly because it looks like there's a real desire for Lemmy bots that use Node. I think there's room for two or more in the fediverse. And hopefully, we can all learn from each other. I know I'm bookmarking the Python bot and watching to see how it improves.

Anyway, I'd like to thank everyone for the suggestions! I'm hoping to get started on it this weekend. We'll see how it goes.