maegulJun 20, 2023

Instance Meta - Is this instance getting flooded with spam bot accounts?

https://startrek.website/post/70521

Instance Meta - Is this instance getting flooded with spam bot accounts? - Star Trek: Website

So, lemmy seems to be flooded with spam bot accounts at the moment. Look through the table of servers on fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy [https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy]) and notice how there are these huge instances without any active users (MAU). Also notice how startrek.website has 9000 users for 276 active users this month. From memory, when I signed up, there was no email requirement or captcha or anything. Admins … maybe you want to tighten things up?

Show threadSysAdminJun 21, 2023

Just a quick update for everyone, yes OP is right and a bunch of bots signed up. We've purged them from our user count and enabled CAPTCHA. Email verification is coming soon as a secondary deterrent.

For the record nobody told us that it's not safe out here. We were aware that self-hosting was wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but has NO IDEA that it wasn't for the timid. 😉

Show threadmaegulJun 22, 2023
Ooh … how did you order e them from your user numbers? Many other admins might not know how to do that … maybe worth sharing?
Show threadwilliams_482

We deleted them from the local_user database table outright based on some sketchy shared attributes, and then manually updated the user count in site_aggregates to the correct figure so our stats wouldn't look so sketchy.

Pretty simple for anyone comfortable in SQL who knows where to look (a helpful user DM'd and gave us a hand here), but not something anybody should try willy nilly if they don't know what they are doing. Editing production data on the fly is not to be done casually.

Jun 23, 2023 at 2:38pmWeb
Show threadmaegulJun 23, 2023

There are pricy probably admins who might appreciate this, as dangerous as it is.

Care if I post it into the lemmy community or even made the support community?

Show threadwilliams_482Jun 23, 2023

Sure, go for it.

Include a mention that even running queries against the database won't necessarily be easy if you don't know what you're doing. where it is located and (separately) how best to access it will depend on how it was installed.