Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.
Part of the problem is the instance's open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.
We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.
Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we're setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!
Back when I signed up for reddit, you didn't need an email and they warned you if you lost your password you'd be locked out of your account until you regained it and they would not offer support to reset it
I liked that. I don't want to have to submit my email for everything just to interact
Catch all? I love it so damn much since I got it. Bitwarden added it on the fly and now I got disposable email addresses for anything I can think of, it's so, so perfect!
You can access it from the android Bitwarden app. Go to the password generator. Where it says "What would you like to generate?", tap Password and select username in the popup, then click OK. After that, it gives you an option to use a different emails when it generates the email address to use for the account you're setting up.
No need. Even selfhost is free. The catch all feature is also included in the free plan. Bitwarden free is amazingly packed with pretty much all the features you need. Tip: Make a 'non-profit' organisation and invite your family to it. You can share passwords for streaming service etc using this.
It annoys the shit out of me how many developers don’t allow for sub-addressing. Google has supported it on Gmail since inception and it follows the damn spec! Don’t use your crappy form validator if it doesn’t allow valid emails!
If you have catch all enabled for your custom domain there's no overhead.
Signing up for reddit? Just put reddit@example.com and that address will be automatically created and start receiving reddit's emails. Don't have to fiddle with anything.
I do this as well but there's been quite a few times when the email input wouldn't accept it and it's usually on the sites you really wanna have it on.
Interesting. How does this work? I've never used it. I either add manual aliases or distribution groups. It's a pain in the ass but it works and is safer than using the same email for everything.
One thing I like is also how you can tell who sold your email to spammers 🤣
And then there's those of us who don't use email for all practical purposes. I haven't sent an email in anger for a donkey's age; the only reason I have an email at all is because of all the people in North America who think email is the wave of the future.
Yeah I still don't have an email associated with my reddit account. Which shocks people... although I haven't logged on in months, so maybe it's now required for legacy accounts
Hah, I replied higher up in the comments that when I signed up for reddit, I also didn't need an email address and I think that particular one never required setting one
Newer accounts definitely did and I used different emails for those accounts
Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there's plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.
Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn't matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.
Personally I don't think anything will stop anyone determined to bring this type of harm to the community, there's an endless list of workarounds. These communities need a larger network of moderators across timezones
I'm reminded of old games that insisted you couldn't sign up with an email provider and had to use an ISP email ... which kinda screwed over the literally BILLIONS of people whose ISPs don't give email addresses...
Because anyone running it can decide to do it this way. That's how code works; you can edit it. Even if the option wasn't there, if any instance admin wants that to happen it's easy to do.