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My instance had 5 users after a few days, two of which were my own. Then one day later there were over 600 users registered on my instance. All of those 600+
by codetrotter 3y ago
My instance had 5 users after a few days, two of which were my own.
Then one day later there were over 600 users registered on my instance.
All of those 600+ new users were spam bot accounts.
Lemmy is sorely lacking the tools for dealing with that kind of thing.
So in order to avoid that the spam accounts that were created could cause problems for other instances, I temporarily shut down my instance until there are tools that I can use to deal with the spam accounts.
https://zapad.nstr.no/ https://zapad.nstr.no/
I wonder how many of the 2M users mentioned in the OP story are real persons, and how many are spam accounts.
- guidedlight 3y agoHow do you know they are spam bots? What defines a bot from a casual lurker?
- deely3 3y agoWhy downvotes? It could be that instance was mentioned somewhere else as easy to register so users just appear somehow organically. OP doesnt mentioned that users behave like bots so this question is logical.
- yonatan8070 3y agoWhen 600 of them show up overnight for no apparent reason
- gremlinsinc 3y agothere is an apparent reason, because Reddit is imploding. they gotta go somewhere.
- codetrotter 3y agoThey all follow a very obvious consistent pattern in their usernames and email addresses.
- notatoad 3y agoI don't really have any reason to doubt you, because I am not involved in admining any Lemmy isntance. But on the other hand, in my casual use of Lemmy.world I have yet to encounter any spam at all. So either the mods there are really incredible, or the spam problem isnt so bad
- andrewstuart2 3y agoOr the spam bots aren't posting but upvoting or being sold as upvote farms.
- timeon 3y agoThere are not that many upvotes yet.
- xeromal 3y agoDoesn't lemmy.world require a captcha which some lemmy's don't have. I don't think even 0.18 has captcha support yet.
- codetrotter 3y ago> I have yet to encounter any spam at all The spam bots that signed up did not start posting on my instance yet at the moment when I discovered them. Probably they are stockpiling accounts for later use.
- jrflowers 3y ago600+ spam bots all defeated the Captcha during signup? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1...
- crazysim 3y agoThat's like a $1 or $3 at my first search engine result service's rate. I'm sure there exists cheaper competitors and/or bulk pricing.
- personjerry 3y agoIn theory once one gets through, they all get through
- codetrotter 3y agoThe GitHub issue you linked talks about restoring captcha. Just like they are talking about, the version of Lemmy that I ran when the wave of spam bots hit me did not have Captcha at all.
- jrflowers 3y agoOh ok. It’s good to know that that tool for dealing with spam accounts is currently available in Lemmy.
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agoAs an admin, what's your ideas how such spam accounts can be prevented?
- snowe2010 3y agoThey can easily prevent spam accounts by requiring captcha and a sign up application. I do so on programming.dev and I haven’t seen a single spam account.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoGPT4's multimodal image mode can decipher pictures of captcha without a hitch. AI can damn near break anything lately.
- pndy 3y agoI wonder that ~600 users even as spam bots had something to do with name you've pick for instance
- codetrotter 3y agoI don’t think so. I’ve seen other instances mentioning a lot of spam bots as well.
- lost_tourist 3y agocould you just do something like beehaw does, but a bit less "don't hurt my feelings" I bet it would be pretty easy to sort out the bots...
- etler 3y agoTo be fair to the Lemmy devs, they couldn't have predicted Reddit deciding to implode itself and haven't had a ton of time to respond to the new reality.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]