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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[-] Wander@yiffit.net 5 points 1 year ago

You should be able to purge the user if you visit their profile.

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

And How would I do that in the UI? This is the issue, haven't found a way to even find those users on my system, even though it marks at 15 extra users.

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 2 points 1 year ago

Did you find a solution. The above comment with the database query should work. You can access the docker container where the database is running with docker exec -it instancedomain_postgres_1 busybox /bin/sh and then run psql -U databaseuser which by default is 'lemmy'.

Check docker ps to know the exact name of the postgres container which in your case likely is lemmytalungorg_postgres_1

[-] talung@lemmy.talung.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks, I have gone through and identified the REAL accounts gathered the ID's and deleted the rest from local_user and person tables.

Haven't really played much with Postgress so took some time to look up all the functionality with that.

EDIT: yup, made sure the person one was local only :)

this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023

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