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.

    • bakerEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I see no problem. Everyone assumes Skynet is a murderbot because any pragmatism we can imagine for the robots would demand we be removed. What if there’s another pragmatic solution, i.e. the xkcd punchline? Just . . . rewire people to be nice.

      Even the robots in The Matrix claim to have tried to give us a utopia, but it made our minds melt down.