Updated to 0.18 and Other News

Hey,

It seems like we're going through a major announcement every few hours, but I wanted to update you all on a few more things. First, I'm sorry that I keep rushing into these updates that, even though they disrupt service only for a few seconds, still are something I should be more committed to announcing. Regardless, we're currently on the latest version of Lemmy, 0.18. Captchas won't return until 0.18.1, so we're stuck with email verification until that is added again. The real problem is that a wave of spam again could potentially eat up our daily allowance of email send-outs, which would make sign-in page password resets and legitimate sign-ups impossible. Still, I'd rather deal with that than leave the instance exposed to thousands of bogus accounts like last time.

Speaking of our SMTP relay, I recently added more DNS records to buff our verification, which should help to keep emails from landing in your spam folder.

That's about it for now. I still want to manually review and eliminate the few remaining bot accounts, which should only be 100-150 left at most (out of nearly 3k). I'll let you all know before any future service disruptions, but it should be smooth sailing for the foreseeable future.

- u/EuphoricPenguin22

EDIT: We're also now on closed registration for the foreseeable future. Bot spam is something we're still dealing with.