Lemmy

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Dealing with Bot Accounts (lemmy.talung.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi there, Been running my own little Lemmy instance basically to see how it runs with federation and stuff like that. I have had open (email validation) for the odd person or 2 that might want to use it.

Early this morning (my time 4:43am) I had about 15 new users all at the exact same time registering as users with same structure names (random words) followed by 4 numbers. Being all within 1 minute of each other they are obvious bots.

Going through the UI I have not been able to find a way to remove them. I have since changed my registration policy to make the person fill in an application, captcha, email validation etc. to help stop polluting the ecosystem with bots.

Any help would be appreciated. I am running it all under docker

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[–] Ricaz 6 points 1 year ago

This is a problem for any web application. There are many solutions, none are perfect.

On some sites (like 4chan) you're required to solve a captcha every single time you post, unless you pay a yearly fee not to.

To avoid it, you would need people actively monitoring, banning, and setting up bot detection patterns.

Then again, there are cheap services online where real people are hired to create human accounts and spam you anyway, so..