"Antiyanks" is back at it again and has switched tactics to spamming a massive number of comments in a short period of time. In addition to being annoying (and sad and pathetic), it's having a deleterious effect on performance and drowns out any discussions happening in those posts. That spam also federates as well as the eventual removals, so it's not limited to just the posts being targeted.
Looking at the site config for the home instance of the latest ~~two~~ three alts, the rate limits were all 99999999. 🤦♂️
Rate limits are a bit confusing, but they mean: X number of requests per Y seconds per IP address.
The comment API endpoint has its own, dedicated bucket. I don't recall the defaults, but they're probably higher than you need unless you're catering to VPN users who would share an IP.
Assuming your server config is correctly passing the client IP via the XFF header, 20 calls to the /create_comment endpoint per minute (60 seconds) per client IP should be sufficient for most cases, though feel free to adjust to your specific requirements.
Edit: A couple of instances accidentally set the "Messages" bucket too low. That bucket is a bit of a catch-all for API endpoints that don't fit a more specific bucket. You'll want to leave that one relatively high compared to the rest. It's named "Messages" but it covers far more than just DMs.
I don’t operate a fed server, but just curious. Couldn’t/shouldn’t rate limits be on a per-user/per-session-token basis to avoid the vpn issue you mentioned?
You'll have to talk to the lemmy devs about that. I'm a retired admin, but last I was aware, they're based on client IP.
Isn't the lemmy main dev that tankie guy you guys hate? Rich coming from you asking labour from them lmao
And that would solve issues with the reverse proxy not forwarding the ip correctly right?
I would hope you are not running a honeypot 👀