Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.

We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.

We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.

We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.

Take care, LW Team

  • kadu@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    No place is safe from this, unfortunately. I moderated 2 big brazilian subreddits, and then decided to volunteer to help a smaller one. I had a day (and to be honest, an entire week) absolutely ruined when somebody did indeed set a bot to post large amounts of CSAM to the subreddit. Luckily I was online to quickly purge it all, and Reddit’s admins did remove the accounts pretty much instantly, but I feel for every Lemmy admin that even caught a glimpse of this material and now have to purge their computers and honestly, their minds, from that. Sorry to hear it happened.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, the term CP (Child Porn) has always been a terrible name for it. It sounds weird, but “Child Porn” sounds much less dramatic than it is, like some sort of fringe porn. Meanwhile CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) make it a lot more clear that there is a child being abused.

        • eric@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Same, and to make sure no one else has to have it in their search history, CSAM stands for “Child Sexual Abuse Material.”

    • Ab_intra@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I saw one of these videos in my feed last night and it was very obvious to me what it was. Thankfully it wasn’t anything that was to bad, but It still gives me the creep that something like that was in my feed.