Hey, your always around and pop your head in, and responsive when I tag you. So your good, just hasnt been much to moderate lately is all.
The pending accounts wont show pending accounts right now. Since the mods seemed to get lax about it I found that even though i usually addressed pending accounts every few hours during the day if and when i would go away for a few days pending accounts wouldnt get handled. I didnt want users to wait multiple days to get approval, so until the mods became active again I solve it with a different approach.
We now have a rather aggressive captcha at signup that users need to go through to signup. So it eliminates nearly 100% of the bots (I havent had to ban a bot in a while). So it seems to mostly solve the problem. It doesn't prevent us from dealing with non-STEM people who people who are going to shit post, but with the rules in place I can just ban them after the fact if thats a problem anyway. So this solution seems to work better, at least until the moderators decide to be as dilligent as me with handling pending invites in which case I wouldnt mind switching back to approval. Either way the captcha seems to be doing the trick until then.
I recently upgraded nextcloud last night to the latest version, I think it may have been a major bump too. I also spent an hour or so writing up a ''healthcheck'' for it. What that does is every few minutes it connects to the webservers login page and checks to see if it serves up a webpage and if that webpage contains a login box. If the server cant be reached it will automatically restart after about 10 minutes or so. This should help the server remain live should it have a bug and go down. I added similar health checks to our other servers.