So some spam signups just happened (all username12345678@gmail.com format e-mail) This caused bounced mail to increase, causing Mailgun to block our domain to prevent it getting blacklisted.
So:
- Mail temporarily doesn’t work
- I closed signups for now
- I will ban the spam accounts
- I will check how to prevent (maybe approval required again?)
Stay tuned.
Edit: so apparently there is a captcha option which I now enabled. Let’s see if this prevents spam. Registrations open again.
Edit2 : Hmm Mailgun isn’t that fast in unblocking the domain. Closing signups again because validation mails aren’t sent
Edit 3: I convinced Mailgun to lift the block. Signups open again.
I ran into the issue on my instance as well, but checking the Captcha option in admin settings, stopped the signups for me.
I love how transparent you are with the management of this instance. Kudos!
This, Refreshing 😀👍
I’ve run into this issue with some of my servers in the past and it’s a real PITA to deal with because not only do you have to mitigate the issue, but then you have to make requests to get de-blacklisted, etc. I finally got sick of it all and installed a Barracuda spam firewall in front of the mail server. I have MUCH easier control over IMAP/SMTP now.
User on kbin here, just tried to sign up to lemmy.world… looks like everything crashed and burned when tried to sign up there.
It was you all along!
Becareful with this. There’s a clear trend of massive amount of bot accounts flooding lemmy as a whole
FYI 18.0 does not have captcha according to release notes. May want to delay upgrade until 18.1? Or institute a stricter signup like requiring email verification? just wanted to mention it
Yeah we use e-mail verification, but the problem was that the spam signups used fake gmail addresses resulting in the mail domain to get blocked. So we’ll wait until 0.18.1
How about adding a captcha? I was surprised there was none when I signed up.
I’m down as long as its privacy friendly and doesn’t use non-free javascript
And accessible
Last time a website I was managing was bombarded with spam signups, I set up a regular expression to check for the incredibly distinctive format the spammers were using… then it reports success but doesn’t actually create the account or send an email. Spam problem over.
Very clever, only problem is it’s not a general solution.
Is there a growth target for the community? I see that Lemmy.world is almost equal in size to lemmy.ml. Will this instance remain open indefinitely?
No target. I will keep this open as long as it’s possible. It’s up to others to start as many Lemmy instances as possible, and the Lemmy devs to create a better join-lemmy with a rotating ‘recommended server’ preferring smaller instances. But that’s difficult. Because you also don’t want 1000 users to land on someone’s Raspberry Pi instance without backup which they can just stop if they get bored of it. Same issue goes for Mastodon as well… but that’s being worked on.
I solved this problem once. What you do is have a custom captcha that you code yourself. It can be as simple as “What is 2+3?” and have 10-20 questions that you rotate between. Most spammers will be too lazy to update their spambot.
Don’t just include it as text though. Rather, present the question as text in a picture.
This is very effective but also blocks people who spend on screen readers
The solution there is to provide a voice over of the captcha.
fwiw - there’s always an arms race between spammers and people trying to not get spammed. It’s often better to use off-the-shelf captcha’s or something as there are people who are able to put a LOT MORE resources into it (like Google, who has billions of dollars on the line to prevent ad-fraud and identify bots)
I used a custom captcha for my personal WordPress blog. It eliminated all the spam. (Fun fact: The spammers know how to work around most anti-spam WordPress plugins. If you roll your own, they aren’t going to update their spambot for one blog.)
I also used a custom captcha at work. We couldn’t use 3rd party filters because it was marking our customers’ comments as spam! The custom captcha also eliminated all the spam.
There’s also a problem with using 3rd party spam services. You have to give them all your data. You also usually have to pay for it, which can be a problem when you’re working for people with a tiny budget.
I am from Lemmy Canada. I have noticed that when I come to a community hosted on Lemmy World I am often signed out. Do I need to sign up here to participate?
No, you should be able to view the community from yours. Like https://lemmy.ca/c/fediverse@lemmy.world
