Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.

We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.

We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.

We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.

Take care, LW Team

  • Ab_intra
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    51 year ago

    Good. If this is what it takes to overcome the issue then it’s fine. Sucks for the real users but they also have alternatives.

      • Whitehat Hacker
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        11 year ago

        Wait I noticed that there’s an image button in the application form, is there any risk that that might be abused by users passing by to upload to pictrs in registrations without an account? That could be a big problem if they could.

        • LCP
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          21 year ago

          Tested it in an incognito tab. It seems to be disabled. Clicking the button does nothing for me.

          • Whitehat Hacker
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            11 year ago

            That’s good then, was worried for a sec that people could upload images without having an account, that would be very bad and make these kind of attacks insanely easy.