The past few days have been very turbulent for this project and also for @gyptazy!

In addition to reaching the milestone of over 500 VPS instances, we have been mentioned on numerous platforms - unfortunately, some of them fundamentally contradict the philosophy of the project.

Within just one day, over 800 requests were sent to our support email (which is not the appropriate channel in the first place). Since we now handle inquiries exclusively through the Matrix bot, the situation has calmed down somewhat. However, it seems the barrier to entry is still not high enough. As a result, a challenge-response system (initially static) has now been integrated via GitHub. People coming from a bsd.cafe Matrix account are whitelisted and can immediately request a box without the GitHub verification part.

Details can be found here: https://boxybsd.com/matrix-bot/.

Unfortunately, this is not an ideal solution, but some balance must be struck between accommodating genuine users and creating a barrier for those who want to run coin miners, bots, spam, and similar activities. There were also some other ideas like post-card/letter verification but I think this is even more challenging and will be the next step if this doesn’t work out.