majorswitcher

what's the point of all these random accounts creation? seems like a automated process. would it be to upload illegal stuff?

https://lemmyfly.org/post/12066

what's the point of all these random accounts creation? seems like a automated process. would it be to upload illegal stuff? - lemmyfly.org

I’ve set registration to Require application again, don’t like this bots creating accounts. Also I’m running into email limitations. Using the Sendgrid Free plan of 100 emails per day, but if a couple of member have email notification on, I’m reaching that 100 very quickly. How do others handle the high email traffic ?

Jun 19, 2023 at 8:21amWeb
Show threadmoneygrowsontreesJun 19, 2023
It serves the same point it served on Reddit. There are huge bot farms dedicated to shaping the social media landscape. There is a new social media "boom" so the bots want to get in on the ground floor.
Show threadmajorswitcherJun 19, 2023
with what purpose ? posting stuff, or some other use ?
Show threadsunaurusJun 19, 2023
Try enabling the captcha in your instance settings, it might help a bit as well!
Show threadthatcasualgamingguyJun 19, 2023
While looking for a way to enable captchas I found out that they will remove that feature from lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2922
Show threadpreciouspuppJun 19, 2023
Wouldn’t it help to force registrations solve an expensive proof of work on the client side?
Show threadthatcasualgamingguyJun 19, 2023
That would probably only slow them down. And since their main goal is to create a ton of working accounts, speed is probably not that important to them. On my own instance the bot-registrations stopped immediately after I enabled the required application.
Show threadunderscoresJun 19, 2023

Captchas are mostly useless nowadays against any well designed bot. The only ones that sort of work are those ridiculously hard ones like several page math problems. And at that point a large portion of people can't solve it either.

They also tend to be full of trackers and are terrible for privacy. Plus they're used to train corporate AIs.

It can help temporarily, because a lot of bots don't bother with captcha solvers, but all the spammers need to do is include a pre-made solver library and the bots are back.

Show threadgodlessJun 19, 2023
Future spam accounts in the making. They are building large bot armies to either flood instances with their crap, or use them for vote manipulation, or a combination thereof.
Show threadThalyssaJun 19, 2023
Probably potential spam accounts.
Show threadRGBJun 19, 2023
My modlog got spammed today by some script banning a lot of people for spam automatically. It's getting wild. This was inevitable with the growth of Lemmy as a platform though.
Show threadmajorswitcherJun 19, 2023
Mine too I see now. You can only ban a user when they have posted something right ? There is no list for admins of all users registered ? Maybe I'll do it direct in the database..
Show threadthatcasualgamingguyJun 19, 2023
Just did that for my instance. Luckily it's fairly easy. Since there were no human registrations after those bots I just looked up the lowest bot id in the local_user table which was 9 and then used delete from person where id in (select person_id from local_user where id >= 9);. Thanks to the references and triggers on the table, the rest of the database was also cleaned up by that, including the local_user table.
Show threadmajorswitcherJun 19, 2023
For me it were the last 30 or something entries in local_user. They all didn’t have email_verified. I access the db through Postico. Also removed all other older accounts that didn’t verify their email address