Look, we can debate the proper and private way to do Captchas all day, but if we remove the existing implementation we will be plunged into a world of hurt.
I run tucson.social - a tiny instance with barely any users and I find myself really ticked off at other Admin’s abdication of duty when it comes to engaging with the developers.
For all the Fediverse discussion on this, where are the github issue comments? Where is our attempt to convince the devs in this.
No, seriously WHERE ARE THEY?
Oh, you think that just because an “Issue” exists to bring back Captchas is the best you can do?
NO it is not the best we can do, we need to be applying some pressure to the developers here and that requires EVERYONE to do their part.
The Devs can’t make Lemmy an awesome place for us if us admins refuse to meaningfully engage with the project and provide feedback on crucial things like this.
So are you an admin? If so, we need more comments here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200
We need to make it VERY clear that Captcha is required before v0.18’s release. Not after when we’ll all be scrambling…
EDIT: To be clear I’m talking to all instance admins, not just Beehaw’s.
UPDATE: Our voices were heard! https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757
The important part was that this was a decision to re-implement the old (if imperfect) solution in time for the upcoming release. mCaptcha and better techs are indeed the better solution, but at least we won’t make ourselves more vulnerable at this critical juncture.
Only 7 accounts still pending, 2 of which, are unrelated to the above flood.
The email address are left out for privacy- however, they are EXTREMELY normal sounding email addresses.
Based on the provided emails, usernames, and request messages- i’d say, it certainly looks like legit users.
Just- very odd of the timing.
5 huh? That’s actually noteable. So far I haven’t seen a real human user take longer than a couple of hours to validate. Human registrations on my instance seem to have a 30% attrition. That is, of 10 real human users, I can reasonably expect that 3 won’t complete the flow. It seems like your case might be nearing 40-50% which isn’t unheard of but couple this with the quickness that these accounts were created - I think you are looking at bots.
The kicker is, though, if one of them IS a real user, it’s going to be almost impossible to find out.
This is indeed getting more sophisticated.
I wish I could see this time period on a cloudflare security dashboard, I’m sure there could be a few more indicators there.
Didn’t really see anything that stood out there either. A handful of users accessing via tor, but, thats about it.
Ended up turning the security policy from low, back up a bit though, forgot I turned it down while troubleshooting some federation issues.
Oh! I just remembered something. Isn’t there a site that recommends a lemmy instance? Might it make sense that multiple users found your website because they change the recommendation to distribute new users? Does that sort of pattern hold in this case?
I checked join-lemmy.org right after this happened- and a few other times. Refreshed multiple times.
To date- I have never seen my instance listed up there.
This list gets updated every few minutes:
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
The master list is there in the same repository.