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Admins, we're about to have a really bad SPAM problem when Lemmy removes captcha support in v.0.18 - You ALL have a responsibility to communicate back to lemmy devs to try to stop it. (tucson.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by th3raid0r@tucson.social to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Look, we can debate the proper and private way to do Captchas all day, but if we remove the existing implementation we will be plunged into a world of hurt.

I run tucson.social - a tiny instance with barely any users and I find myself really ticked off at other Admin's abdication of duty when it comes to engaging with the developers.

For all the Fediverse discussion on this, where are the github issue comments? Where is our attempt to convince the devs in this.

No, seriously WHERE ARE THEY?

Oh, you think that just because an "Issue" exists to bring back Captchas is the best you can do?

NO it is not the best we can do, we need to be applying some pressure to the developers here and that requires EVERYONE to do their part.

The Devs can't make Lemmy an awesome place for us if us admins refuse to meaningfully engage with the project and provide feedback on crucial things like this.

So are you an admin? If so, we need more comments here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200

We need to make it VERY clear that Captcha is required before v0.18's release. Not after when we'll all be scrambling...

EDIT: To be clear I'm talking to all instance admins, not just Beehaw's.

UPDATE: Our voices were heard! https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757

The important part was that this was a decision to re-implement the old (if imperfect) solution in time for the upcoming release. mCaptcha and better techs are indeed the better solution, but at least we won't make ourselves more vulnerable at this critical juncture.

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I also find it amusing that many people say the solution is to build your own solution. Do you not want the fediverse to grow? If you want people to feel like they can just spin up their own instances, you need to stop assuming that they have the ability to do their own development, their own sysop and sysad, their own security, their own community management, their own… everything. People are not omniscient and the outright hostility towards someone asking for help, or surfacing their opinion on the matter isn’t helping.

to underscore this: if we had to do all of this this instance would not exist and/or we would have shut off applications about 10,000 people ago. we do not have the capabilities to do all of this even now with like a dozen people volunteering to help us! we are one of the largest instances on Lemmy and one of the most active! please recognize how ridiculous and burdensome it is to just throw more non-inbuilt tech at problems like this, and how exclusionary that is going to be to anybody who is without free time and extremely tech-savviness. if you want this space to grow it needs to be at a point where people can just use it and not have to worry about this shit.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm a DevOps/SysOps/SecOps engineer - have been for over a decade now. Even if I CAN do all the things listed, it takes time to do it. It takes time to configure your networking layer, especially when documentation of the underlying app is in flux and never 100% correct. It takes time to secure your server, especially when the "prod" configuration in the repo isn't really that secure at all.

Folks saying to just "code it myself" - sure, let me stop doing my day job and start planning on this completely unpaid enhancement. Let me tell my wife - "Sorry babe, gotta prove this internet person wrong and it must be today - can't go to board game night with you". I mean, I'll actually likely end up coding it myself, but when I can. Not when the trolls who say "Oh, come on, it'll be EZ" - yeah, I know better than that.

Folks just say to "Use other solutions" - Great! I already budgeted 150/month of my own money. Oh wait, that doesn't matter much when I have to worry about instances that can't spend that type of scratch.

[–] towerful@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The 2 Lemmy devs have funding. About 1500 total from community support, with the rest coming from a sponsorship/incubator type deal. A deal which pays out when targets/goals are achieved.
Which made me laugh at this:

sure, let me stop doing my day job and start planning on this completely unpaid enhancement

Which is entirely what you are asking the Lemmy devs to do.

Thanks for raising awareness of the spam-bot-account issue.

[–] progandy@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In the same article where they provided that 1500 number, the developers said they currently do not receive sponsorship money, as they are delaying those targets in order to improve stability and robustness.

Update: It looks like that number is about double now, about 3000 accross their three donation platforms.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 4 points 1 year ago

Well I am making a distinction between creating a newer implementation and rolling back to an older, known implementation. It's why I find it bizarre when folks point out that there's a new feature request and a PR is guarenteed accepted - yes, but that will take more time than reverting some commits and maybe retrofitting if needed. The entire point I was trying to make is that they could just roll back, and when the new feature is ready, we can go right to it. I'm not (at least intentionally) asking for grandiose work and assuming going back is quicker and more readily available than waiting for a new solution to be implemented.