We deleted them from the local_user database table outright based on some sketchy shared attributes, and then manually updated the user count in site_aggregates to the correct figure so our stats wouldn't look so sketchy.

Pretty simple for anyone comfortable in SQL who knows where to look (a helpful user DM'd and gave us a hand here), but not something anybody should try willy nilly if they don't know what they are doing. Editing production data on the fly is not to be done casually.

Thank you for your care of this place, and due diligence.

With the instance growing so quickly, aggregate stats can flag but are vulnerable to aliasing.

I very much appreciate the path to lemmy membership that you offered to us in the final hours before many of the subreddits went dark.

The there is a ratcheting chain of new members to this and other Lemmy instances is still happening. I have the sense that there’s still a lot of private chat on Reddit as folks looking for a new place to be are enquiring of those who’ve already migrated.

All to say, when it is sorted, it would be great to have an updated sticky with the details so those of us here can support the less tech adept among us make the transition.

‘Posted’ is even a higher bar than ‘commented’, a 10th of a 10th.

Not to say that there isn’t a need to filter out sockpuppets and bots at signup, but rather that the inference being made from the stats was not obvious.

For sure! If I were running a more general and globally focused instance that would be a larger concern. I understand using a VPN in North America, but not so much from other countries. I guess my vision is that it's only really locals accessing the site for the most part. If someone is travelling out of the country, they can equivalently use a U.S. based VPN server.

I suppose my example of Arizona came across as the proposed bounds of my geoblock. I'd probably just say "North America" to avoid the issues of remote workers using a company VPN to access the site (please don't though, your company probably doesn't like that - the current version of lemmy is VERY bandwidth inefficient )

Also, consider that I can use one Geoblock for my signup page, and different, more permissive one for the login page which should make things a bit more reasonable.

Agreed, and my one call to action post to get other Admins to give a crap fell on it's face over on beehaw. It seems that many admins really think that every instance should use manual registration, or other tools. All in all, the message I got was "The devs don't have to listen to anyone".

I'm now of the opinion that most lemmy admins aren't people I want to associate with, they seem to be all about "open source" until it collides with concepts like "collective responsibility" and you'll get a response in the individualist line of reasoning of "Oh, just fix it yourself".

Kbin is sure lookin' pretty good these days now.

Yeah, I heavily modified and expanded upon someone else's query to seek out and destroy more of the accounts. Theirs is basically pattern-matching some of the Gmail-with-numbers spam, but there's a subset using junk@junk with no actual .TLD to try and get people's email verification to bounce. Someone else said that ended up in people getting their email relay account suspended, hence why email verification (at least without CAPTCHAs) is a fairly bad idea. I added a table join and some extra matching to find some of those extra bogus "emails," which typically results in quite a few more accounts being banned. There are two major caveats with my method: 1) it doesn't delete the accounts, which is really just a simple modification to the query to "fix," and 2) it doesn't deal with spam accounts that have no email attached, although those seem to be a fairly small subset of the account spam. I'll see if there is an easier way to deal with those, but getting most banned or deleted is still pretty easy.