Why do random communities appear on my instance?
Why do random communities appear on my instance?
There have appeared hundreds of communities on my instance I have never searched. Where do they come from? Is it some spam attack? How do I prevent this, and how do I get rid of them?
Are you alone on your instance? Or do you also have another users there?
Well, it says that I have 11 users on my instance. And I don't mind having them if they are not bots or communities crawlers. But it's hard for me to believe that 11 users could have searched so many communities in such a short period of time. Is there a way to check that they're legit users?
Not sure how to check if they're bots or not, but I would enable captcha for registrations. Also that's where I was pointing at, other users might have searched for these communities. I also have many of them on my instance which I've never searched for, and I think that it's all from them. All it takes is for some random user to click on a community in a post and it's then added to your instances.
it’s hard for me to believe that 11 users could have searched so many communities
There are a half-dozen scripts that do this automatically. It's entirely believable.
Someone else who is a registered user did. Pulling new communities is only possible if user is logged in on that instance.
Do you guys think I should enable captcha?
Unless you want the job of moderating your users you should close registration.
Barring that you should make sure email verification is enabled, captcha, and maybe even the questionnaire.
As an admin you can go to the applications icon, looks like a clipboard. Look at all, and see who's joined. If they're unwanted or bots, ban them.
I suspect your instance was used to backup the original communities.
Most of them from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world