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.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•2 years ago

    I had the same issue with spam accounts being created and ended up logging into postgres and deleting user accounts that didn’t have a verified email. My instance is very fresh though and doesn’t have a ton of non-me users so I could safely delete them. Once I enabled captcha and deleted those accounts I don’t have issues with user counts.