The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
They agreed to add them back. You can read their comments in OPs link
That only happened recently, though. For weeks they were replying to instance admins requests to reinstate captchas with things like “bots have beaten captchas, so they’re useless.”
What are you talking about? The issue to bring back captchas was only opened
4 days ago!Captchas were only removed 2 weeks ago, no one spoke up then: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2922
The developers have nothing against captchas. They were the ones who originally built and added the feature: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/1027
My mistake, I understood admins had been asking for the return of captchas as soon as they were removed.
Still, it took a few days for the devs to agree to reinstate them, which, combined with the general tone seem in that second link, is what gave me the impression that they were reluctant to do so.
In open-source projects and communities, it’s often a bad idea to go around looking for (or inventing) conflicts among contributors. It can come across as drama-seeking or trolling.
In software engineering in general, a common reason that a desirable feature has not been written yet is that the people who know & work on the code only have so many hands, and so many hours in the day, and there are other things that also need doing.
This service is undergoing rapid development. Spam & abuse problems are things that folks who have run Internet services before are well aware of. It’s not like anyone is going to give up and let spam bots ruin the thing they’re building.
I doubt anyone wants to build a service that becomes 95+% spam & abuse, ya know?