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.

  • ikiru@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m sure it’s different per instance, but is there any discussion on what is being done with the collected emails?

    I understand the need to fight bots and spam, but there are also those of us who don’t want to associate emails with accounts so some privacy-related way of handling this would be appreciated.