Civilloquy Meta

Due to image hosting taking up the bulk of space and cost growing prohibitive on VPSs, I have migrated Civilloquy's image hosting to Backblaze. For context, with most VPSs, to upgrade the storage, you have to upgrade everything and it's a major jump in cost. You have the cheapo tier with, say, 20 GB; then the next tier for twice the price with twice the storage, twice the vCPUs, etc.; then the next tier with double everything again. I started running out of space on an already upgraded plan this week, and upgrading would have pushed my financial constraints for hosting this for a temporary bandaid.

Instead, I migrated to object storage, where you can just pay for the storage you need, independent of anything else and at a much reduced price. Backblaze B2 is significantly cheaper than any other option, and I have had good experiences with them in the past, so that is what is being used now.

The migration required taking the site down for most of yesterday evening, and some residual space issues caused some instability this morning, but now everything seems to be working well.

So far this week, Civilloquy jumped from 20-some accounts to just under 10,000. My initial thought was that the UI was bugging with federation somehow, but then I saw that, as @[email protected] has pointed out, spam bots have been making ridiculous numbers of accounts on unprotected instances. I enabled captchas today and, unable to identify any legitimate accounts created since Sunday, decided to just delete all accounts created in the last two days.

It took me a bit to get the user count corrected, but @[email protected] helped by clarifying that you just need to run:

update site_aggregates
set users = (select count(*) from local_user)
where site_id = 1;

Hopefully captchas will stop the spam as I would like to keep signups as easy as possible, but allowing spam isn't an acceptable tradeoff if that's what that would mean. I'll keep monitoring the situation.