Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.
We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.
When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.
Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.
Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.
You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities
Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.
It looks like ttrpg.network is also being used. Will that instance be blocked as well?
If we do, we will reach out to them first with any concerns and then make another post here prior to blocking them.
Based on the time stamps, it does look like the same person made 17 accounts on
ttrpg.networkon December 8th before going back to making them onlemmy.org. Running a more robust query, in total I’m seeing 88 of those accounts onlemmy.organd the 17 accounts onttrpg.network, all of which are banned on here.Right now I’m thinking that we will keep an eye out for more accounts, and then reach out to admins if it becomes a problem on another instance
That sounds fair.