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Why do random communities appear on my instance? (random-hero.com)

submitted 1 year ago by pinkolik@random-hero.com to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] pinkolik@random-hero.com 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] HangingFruit@czech-lemmy.eu 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 3 points 1 year ago

Not just that but some legit users will use a script to populate a ton of communities.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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.