That's a good question. There are many spam bots that have been banned over the years, including accounts that were Lemmy.nz local accounts. My memory is not good enough to remember if anyone has been banned outside of spam. It should be in the modlog but I am not sure if there is an easy way to look that up.

[–] sambrown@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for running this instance and for dealing with all the junk.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's my pleasure. Most spam is on other instances, I will ban it locally if I know about it, but when their home instance bans them then it automatically applies here too. And running the instance software itself is pretty low effort these days, not like the early days 😅

The hardest part is trying to work out if the registration applications are genuine or ChatGPT.

Most people applying from NZ are pretty easy to spot, because of the way they talk and the words they use. Many spammers just write their spam message in the registration field because they are automated bots. But the AI ones are just genuine looking enough but also super generic answers, so it's hard to know if they are genuine.

Then many people never post or comment, which is fine, but you can't just watch people for a few days to see if they are genuine. Other instances have had sleeper spam accounts that have woken up a year later and started posting spam.

But even this is pretty low maintenance these days. Maybe 5 applications a week, and unless there is a wave of spam then most are genuine. I've approved 6 applications this week and only one I was a bit unsure about. Can't remember if I've denied any recently, Lemmy clears them out after some period (a day? A week?) so the username can be reused.