I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I’ve gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.

Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.

    • prothy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Here are mine, according to the admin chat others have gotten similar ones

      However, these bots will adapt like you would expect LLMs to do so the messages will change depending on the registration text.

      • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Thats incredibly helpful, thank you. Do you have email verification turned on on your instance?

        • prothy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I had it turned off today as a test but I just enabled it (registrations were disabled over the past week or so). I guess I’ll see tomorrow if it makes a difference

          • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Thanks again - when the bots came for my instance, they were stopped because all the email addresses were fake and they couldnt pass validation. I’m hoping the combination of email and manual verification helps to stop the wave. Seeing what you’ve posted in the image is really useful, im going to look back at our applications and see if any are similar, which would mean they may have got around the email validation.