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.

  • fax@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    had to create an account to post since my comments from sffa.community and kbin.social weren’t showing up.

    I’m an admin over at sffa.community. We did notice the bot wave. They never got past email verification. We hve since implemented CAPTCHA and have purged the bots from our database.

    You can see we are down to organic users. We’ve only been officially open for a couple weeks so we’re still working on content but we are safe to federate with again, if you’d like.