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) 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?
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. 😉
Ooh … how did you purge them from your user numbers? Many other admins might not know how to do that … maybe worth sharing?
We deleted them from the
local_userdatabase table outright based on some sketchy shared attributes, and then manually updated the user count insite_aggregatesto 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.
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?
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.
Just a member here, but given the recent rapid growth in the past 10 days as folks migrate over from a 600k subreddit (myself included), and the normal 90% lurker rule-of-thumb, this is actually a fairly reasonable monthly active user ratio.
I genuinely understand the concern to avoid bots and trolls, but have admins in other instances actually documented a significant number of bots originating through this instance?
There is some Verified Suspicious ActivityTM. We’re hoping to get it sorted out soon.
Thank you for your care of this place, and due diligence.
With the instance growing so quickly, aggregate stats can flag but are vulnerable to aliasing.
I very much appreciate the path to lemmy membership that you offered to us in the final hours before many of the subreddits went dark.
The there is a ratcheting chain of new members to this and other Lemmy instances is still happening. I have the sense that there’s still a lot of private chat on Reddit as folks looking for a new place to be are enquiring of those who’ve already migrated.
All to say, when it is sorted, it would be great to have an updated sticky with the details so those of us here can support the less tech adept among us make the transition.
You have a point, especially as lemmy defines “active” as a user that has at least posted once within the relevant time period. So yes, lurkers definitely wouldn’t count toward the active user count (mastodon and the like use different metrics AFAIU).
‘Posted’ is even a higher bar than ‘commented’, a 10th of a 10th.
Not to say that there isn’t a need to filter out sockpuppets and bots at signup, but rather that the inference being made from the stats was not obvious.
Yea I’m unclear on whether commenting counts as being active. I would guess that it does.
I had this issue as well on my instance. Here’s how I fixed it with SQL commands included. TL;DR Turn on CAPTCHAs, don’t use email verification (as they will spam the shit out of it), and use SQL commands to ban all of them in one fell swoop.
Yo thanks for this. I’m not rlly good with dbs and was trying to figure out how to mass get ride of some boy accounts. Luckily I noticed B4 it got super bad
Yeah, I heavily modified and expanded upon someone else’s query to seek out and destroy more of the accounts. Theirs is basically pattern-matching some of the Gmail-with-numbers spam, but there’s a subset using junk@junk with no actual .TLD to try and get people’s email verification to bounce. Someone else said that ended up in people getting their email relay account suspended, hence why email verification (at least without CAPTCHAs) is a fairly bad idea. I added a table join and some extra matching to find some of those extra bogus “emails,” which typically results in quite a few more accounts being banned. There are two major caveats with my method: 1) it doesn’t delete the accounts, which is really just a simple modification to the query to “fix,” and 2) it doesn’t deal with spam accounts that have no email attached, although those seem to be a fairly small subset of the account spam. I’ll see if there is an easier way to deal with those, but getting most banned or deleted is still pretty easy.
Admin of tucson.social here - I haven’t noticed an attack on my instance yet but I do have Captcha AND Email validation turned on.
Since my instance is for Arizonan’s only, I could do a geo-ip block if pressed, but obviously that won’t work for places like startrek.website.
If any admin needs assistance, I recommend enlisting some help over at programming.dev - likely the best instance for collaborating on our lemmy servers.
geoblocking is also a bit of a blunt instrument, many people either use network wide VPNs or even sometimes the ISPs IP blocks are mislocated (my work ISP has my IP in a different state)
I just closed my registration, was onboarding it and syncing up communities in prep for a 7/1 rush. Haven’t seen any attempts yet. But will probably just work out a kbin instance and move on. Too much drama with the lemmy devs.
Agreed, and my one call to action post to get other Admins to give a crap fell on it’s face over on beehaw. It seems that many admins really think that every instance should use manual registration, or other tools. All in all, the message I got was “The devs don’t have to listen to anyone”.
I’m now of the opinion that most lemmy admins aren’t people I want to associate with, they seem to be all about “open source” until it collides with concepts like “collective responsibility” and you’ll get a response in the individualist line of reasoning of “Oh, just fix it yourself”.
Kbin is sure lookin’ pretty good these days now.
I think the tone of your other post and the call to essentially brigade GitHub and demand changes from the devs put a lot of other instances admins in an uneasy position. You also said that instance admins were “abdicating their responsibility” to demand things of the devs.
Isn’t jumping ship to kbin abdicating your responsibility to stay on and help grow Lemmy…?
To be fair I have no ill will with you, but that post stunk of open source entitlement. https://tommcfarlin.com/open-source-entitlements-users/
I find it odd that a lot of people communicating that there is a problem and that they are impacted equates to brigading. To me, how can they know how wide reaching a change was if there is only a couple of comments from more savvy admins? There’s a difference between knowing a decision created a problem, and knowing a decision created a BIG far-reaching problem. From my perspective, sometimes we forget to think about the bigger implications of changes and that’s where community pressure and action can come in.
Yeah, I could probably work on my tone a bit. The internet echo chamber has trended my communication style to be more bold, but the fediverse does appear to be ever so slightly different.
Also, haven’t moved to Kbin yet - it’s just tempting - and yes it would be abdicating my responsibility to grow Lemmy and contribute to that project, thus I haven’t done it yet.
As for open-source entitlement - here’s what irks me - Admins are users, indeed, but we’re not the type of user that blog is admonishing, and I’m not asking other admins to become that. I plan to contribute code to the lemmy code base, make some bots, and generally enrich the ecosystem. So when the ecosystem itself is threatened (by spam), I can’t help but sense that this is something bigger than “open-source entitlement”.
Yeah agree. Like I get their captcha is bad. But why rip out a piece of the puzzle without a solution? Doesn’t seem to be conflicts just “I guess it’s time”. It’s a weird hill to die on. Just defer the removal until a pr for a better alternative. Security is an onion, no one thing is gonna stop spammer and bots.
@SysAdmin should definitely enable captcha at the very least.
Edit: Tagging @[email protected] to maybe get visibility here?
rabbitea.rs appears to be entirely made for spam accounts and I have suggested to my instance that we ban it only because it has no genuine activity that I can see.
They might’ve cleaned up their instance, from what I can see when I bring it up now according to the stats there is only one user there.
