this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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How is this even a thing? Why would the Lemmy software even allow operation like this?
Let's be real - an email address doesn't really stop much of anything. Anyone can really easily spin up new email addresses freely.
Yeah I still don't have an email associated with my reddit account. Which shocks people... although I haven't logged on in months, so maybe it's now required for legacy accounts
it's not required globally but some subs require it to be able to post
So far only /r/formula1 does for me
Hah, I replied higher up in the comments that when I signed up for reddit, I also didn't need an email address and I think that particular one never required setting one
Newer accounts definitely did and I used different emails for those accounts
They somehow managed to force me to add my email. I don't remember how.
Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there's plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.
Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn't matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.
Personally I don't think anything will stop anyone determined to bring this type of harm to the community, there's an endless list of workarounds. These communities need a larger network of moderators across timezones
Nope, but it will stop the less determined ones.
With no email verification, you can pretty much create dozens of fake accounts per second - as fast as the API can handle.
Sure. But we changed our sign-up policy recently. Users are now informed during sign-up that temporary email accounts are banned.
We have another announcement regarding this soon.
How do you define a "temporary email account"?
I'm reminded of old games that insisted you couldn't sign up with an email provider and had to use an ISP email ... which kinda screwed over the literally BILLIONS of people whose ISPs don't give email addresses...