Lemmy.World Announcements @lemmy.world Ruud @lemmy.world 2y ago

[Solved] Temporarily closed signups because of spam signups

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.

20 comments

I ran into the issue on my instance as well, but checking the Captcha option in admin settings, stopped the signups for me.
can't have anything nice nowadays
I love how transparent you are with the management of this instance. Kudos!
- This, Refreshing 😀👍
Becareful with this. There's a clear trend of massive amount of bot accounts flooding lemmy as a whole
- Becareful with this. There’s a clear trend of massive amount of bot accounts flooding lemmy as a whole
  
  I am not sure there's anything in that that denotes "massive amount of bot accounts". Seems more like "a lot more people made lemmy accounts than stuck around" which is unsurprising.
  
  Why would a bot account show up in one of your graphs and not the other?
  
  they're waiting to use the bots when the community is large, over a long period of time. This way it'd be hard to detect the bots.
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!
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.
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
- Yes, we'll wait for 0.18.1.
- 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
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.
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.
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

20 comments