So, lemmy seems to be flooded with spam bot accounts at the moment. Look through the table of servers on fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy) and notice how there are these huge instances without any active users (MAU).
Also notice how startrek.website
has 9000 users for 276 active users this month.
From memory, when I signed up, there was no email requirement or captcha or anything.
Admins … maybe you want to tighten things up?
Yes, this is a big issue currently going on…
Enabeling captcha should fix the issue. Email alone not since they will abuse the email service
Admin of tucson.social here - I haven’t noticed an attack on my instance yet but I do have Captcha AND Email validation turned on.
Since my instance is for Arizonan’s only, I could do a geo-ip block if pressed, but obviously that won’t work for places like startrek.website.
If any admin needs assistance, I recommend enlisting some help over at programming.dev - likely the best instance for collaborating on our lemmy servers.
I just closed my registration, was onboarding it and syncing up communities in prep for a 7/1 rush. Haven’t seen any attempts yet. But will probably just work out a kbin instance and move on. Too much drama with the lemmy devs.
Agreed, and my one call to action post to get other Admins to give a crap fell on it’s face over on beehaw. It seems that many admins really think that every instance should use manual registration, or other tools. All in all, the message I got was “The devs don’t have to listen to anyone”.
I’m now of the opinion that most lemmy admins aren’t people I want to associate with, they seem to be all about “open source” until it collides with concepts like “collective responsibility” and you’ll get a response in the individualist line of reasoning of “Oh, just fix it yourself”.
Kbin is sure lookin’ pretty good these days now.
Yeah agree. Like I get their captcha is bad. But why rip out a piece of the puzzle without a solution? Doesn’t seem to be conflicts just “I guess it’s time”. It’s a weird hill to die on. Just defer the removal until a pr for a better alternative. Security is an onion, no one thing is gonna stop spammer and bots.
I think the tone of your other post and the call to essentially brigade GitHub and demand changes from the devs put a lot of other instances admins in an uneasy position. You also said that instance admins were “abdicating their responsibility” to demand things of the devs.
Isn’t jumping ship to kbin abdicating your responsibility to stay on and help grow Lemmy…?
To be fair I have no ill will with you, but that post stunk of open source entitlement. https://tommcfarlin.com/open-source-entitlements-users/
geoblocking is also a bit of a blunt instrument, many people either use network wide VPNs or even sometimes the ISPs IP blocks are mislocated (my work ISP has my IP in a different state)
For sure! If I were running a more general and globally focused instance that would be a larger concern. I understand using a VPN in North America, but not so much from other countries. I guess my vision is that it’s only really locals accessing the site for the most part. If someone is travelling out of the country, they can equivalently use a U.S. based VPN server.
I suppose my example of Arizona came across as the proposed bounds of my geoblock. I’d probably just say “North America” to avoid the issues of remote workers using a company VPN to access the site (please don’t though, your company probably doesn’t like that - the current version of lemmy is VERY bandwidth inefficient )
Also, consider that I can use one Geoblock for my signup page, and different, more permissive one for the login page which should make things a bit more reasonable.
@SysAdmin should definitely enable captcha at the very least.
Edit: Tagging @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website to maybe get visibility here?
Yep. Been seeing this on mine and a few other instances. They are random word + numbers. They are using bogus emails which cause bounces. One instance that was hit got their mail service locked out because of bounced emails.
I enabled captcha and manually deleted the users that had signed up… Its very hard to list users in local instances.
I had this issue as well on my instance. Here’s how I fixed it. TL;DR Turn on CAPTCHAs, don’t use email verification (as they will spam the shit out of it), and use SQL commands to ban all of them in one fell swoop.
Yo thanks for this. I’m not rlly good with dbs and was trying to figure out how to mass get ride of some boy accounts. Luckily I noticed B4 it got super bad
Yeah, I heavily modified and expanded upon someone else’s query to seek out and destroy more of the accounts. Theirs is basically pattern-matching some of the Gmail-with-numbers spam, but there’s a subset using junk@junk with no actual .TLD to try and get people’s email verification to bounce. Someone else said that ended up in people getting their email relay account suspended, hence why email verification (at least without CAPTCHAs) is a fairly bad idea. I added a table join and some extra matching to find some of those extra bogus “emails,” which typically results in quite a few more accounts being banned. There are two major caveats with my method: 1) it doesn’t delete the accounts, which is really just a simple modification to the query to “fix,” and 2) it doesn’t deal with spam accounts that have no email attached, although those seem to be a fairly small subset of the account spam. I’ll see if there is an easier way to deal with those, but getting most banned or deleted is still pretty easy.