I created a process to remove the bot accounts from my database without crashing my site. I have tested and it looks like all functions are working. If you need help because you suddenly have thousands more accounts than you would suspect ask me for the procedure. I’ll gladly provide it.

I was able to identify bot accounts by looking at creation times. They accounts are grouped by “batches” where the account creation times are within seconds of each other. That’s not typically going to happen with random humans creating accounts.

At this point, I’m not certain anymore. Luckily all the accounts use values that are easy to identify them. I’ll figure out how to remove them. Sorry for the false alarm work.

I always assume I’m wrong first, I may have put that in the wrong spot. Where should I put that in the query? I put it under the Select statement.

SELECT * from local_user; provides a list of users that has a password_encrypted field. That list is exactly equal (all the same accounts are listed) to what I get from: select   p.name,   p.display_name,   a.person_id,   a.email,   a.email_verified,   a.accepted_application from   local_user a,   person p where   a.person_id = p.id;

So I can see a persons a.email (email address), a.person_id, and their password_encrypted (hash) by correlating these tables, can I not?

These accounts are NOT ALL local to my server… So I MUST be being passed hashes, right?

Thank you for the link to this story. It connected together a few dots and made some things finally makes sense.

I don’t know how to make this not about me. So, I’m just going to say it. Friday I closed a 13 year old Reddit account. Saturday and Sunday I brought up multiple Fediverse servers. I now have Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, Owncast, and NextCloud working. I have yet to get Element Chat and PeerTube running. They will happen by Friday. When I opened my Owncast I killed my Twitch account. When PeerTube is up and running I drop YouTube. My point is, I want to thank Reddit for providing me the motivation to leave corporate social media and switch to my own platform. I’m not going back… I’m going forward.