this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
68 points (98.6% liked)

Lemmy

12557 readers
2 users here now

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

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

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
nutomic@lemmy.ml
68
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
63 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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:

  1. Close sign-ups entirely
  2. Only allow sign-ups with applications
  3. 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Somoon@lemmy.sumuun.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was brought to my attention that my instance was hit with the spam bots regs. I've disabled registration and deleted the accounts from the DB. is there anything else I can do to clear the user stats on the sidebar?

[โ€“] sunaurus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

You can do this by updating site_aggregates.users in your database (WHERE site_id = 1)