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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Huh, that is interesting, yeah, that pattern is very anomalous. If you have DB access you can try to run this query to return all un-verified users and see if you can identify if the email activations are being completed:
SELECT p.id, p.name, l.email FROM person AS p LEFT JOIN local_user AS l ON p.id=l.person_id WHERE p.local=true AND p.banned=false AND l.email_verified='f'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 to smaller instances (hourly perhaps)? 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.
Interesting, I definitely see mine. I'm wayyyyyy at the bottom of the popular section, (likely due to the 9 bots that added themselves before I banned the accounts.).
I wonder if one of the settings in your firewall is blocking that particular bot?
I don't recall when I would've done the same, but I do recall not being on join-lemmy until - well - now actually.
/shrugs. isn't much in the way of firewall logic, even at the cloudflare logic. Although- only :443 is actually forwarded to go anywhere.