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.
Do you guys have captchas enabled? That did the trick for me for now. I would be careful about enabling email verification, as that is something that the account spambots are also apparently targeting. If you’re on a free tier of an SMTP relay service, it could quickly burn through your quota.
Could this be a DDOS attempt on Lemmy instances, the times you stated match what I see and the instance has started to slow.
We don’t have captchas right now and our admin is out of office this week😬
You said that you’re an admin, right? Captchas are something you can easily turn on in the admin panel.
Nope not an admin, thinking about setting one up tomorrow though.