Lemmy

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Dealing with Bot Accounts (lemmy.talung.org)

submitted 1 year ago by talung@lemmy.talung.org to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hi there, Been running my own little Lemmy instance basically to see how it runs with federation and stuff like that. I have had open (email validation) for the odd person or 2 that might want to use it.

Early this morning (my time 4:43am) I had about 15 new users all at the exact same time registering as users with same structure names (random words) followed by 4 numbers. Being all within 1 minute of each other they are obvious bots.

Going through the UI I have not been able to find a way to remove them. I have since changed my registration policy to make the person fill in an application, captcha, email validation etc. to help stop polluting the ecosystem with bots.

Any help would be appreciated. I am running it all under docker

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[–] b3nsn0w@pricefield.org 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

the only mass solution i found to this was that i installed pgadmin, logged into the db, and manually removed all the bot accounts from local_user. you should also remove them from the person table as well (you can easily find them if you do SELECT * FROM person WHERE local = true ORDER BY published DESC in the query tool), that way they don't show up in your instance stats, but removing them from local_user would be enough to stop them from logging in.

[–] talung@lemmy.talung.org 3 points 1 year ago

thanks I will try this.