cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/177673

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.

  • @nanoUFOEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I saw that but that was a /pol/ chatbot just regurgitating things people said you don’t exactly have to write intelligent comments on /pol/, 90% of the people there write like bots. My guess performance in a slower board like /lit/ or somewhere that requires more knowledge of subject matters and where people write more intelligently it would be called out.

    I was messing around with that dudes chatbot OpenAssistant and while interesting it fails the same way all the others do once pressed hard enough (which isn’t that hard). These bots seem to do best when you just ask them to regurgitate something from their training library. Which is why non programmers are amazed by it’s programming skill (copy pasting from github repo’s and stackoverflow) vs devs in the field asking it novel questions and not getting anything interesting out of it.