Hello, I noticed that my user count started going up much quicker than it should have. We probably have no more than 20-30 people on my instance at most, but the user count is now into the thousands.
Screenshot taken last night
Screenshot taken a few minutes ago
I’m not really sure what could be causing this, but it seems like some sort of database issue. I recently upgraded the server plan, since it’s a VPS. Perhaps sending the shutdown signal and not manually stopping the Docker container caused PostgreSQL to shit itself. (Yeah, this was probably a bad idea). While I’m a bit rusty, I did have a semester class on SQL that might come in handy. Any ideas on what I should do?
I suppose it could also be account spammers, so I did try and enable captchas. Unfortunately, email verification is still not an option for me to enable at this point. Assuming this was the issue, is there a way to remove the spam accounts?
The captcha did seem to stop the endless tick of the user count, but I’m not sure how we can get rid of the spam accounts.
Yes, there is a spambot attack ongoing that targets instances with open registration and no email verification, captcha or admin approval.
Does Lemmy have any tools to mass-delete new accounts within a time-frame?
AFAIK no and I hate to state the obvious, but it is a really bad idea to open a service to the public with no registration checks in place what so ever. Especially in a federated network, where is also effects other servers.
Right now I think you will have to delete them manually from the database.
Yeah, I’ve already made a few blunders that I’m learning from. I’ll see what I can do.