Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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PSA: Many Lemmy instances are currently experiencing massive automated sign-ups (bots)! If you run an instance with open sign-ups, please read! (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sunaurus@lemm.ee to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

Open sign-ups
No captcha
No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

Close sign-ups entirely
Only allow sign-ups with applications
Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

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[–] ikiru@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure it's different per instance, but is there any discussion on what is being done with the collected emails?

I understand the need to fight bots and spam, but there are also those of us who don't want to associate emails with accounts so some privacy-related way of handling this would be appreciated.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there's plenty of services that provide one-use emails or disposable ones

[–] ikiru@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

True, I use one myself.

That's a cool instance you're running over there, by the way! I appreciate it.