Chat

In short: the service has become hard to manage and bots (likely) have taken advantage of our kindness spamming other rooms/users. Because of that our hosting provider wanted to shut down our entire TROM.tf server. Hard to deal with all that and with a huge 300GB database. On top of this anyone can make an account with matrix.org or other instances.

Abuse report

For the past weeks the hosting company has reported that there are a lot of requests from our server to outside sources. Tons of requests every second. This looks like an attack from our server. Looking at the ports that these requests came from, our Matrix (Synapse – matrix.trom.tf) seems to be the blame.

When we enabled this service we allowed guests registrations. Meaning that anyone could use our service without an email or any verification. In today’s world this can be easily abused, and bots could register. These bots could then spam many other Matrix rooms/channels. And maybe this is the cause of the Abuse report.

We removed all (500) guest accounts. But we have some 500 more registered users that we cannot check on. Maybe some are still bots?!

We “fixed” the issue for now since the hosting company has not sent an Abuse report lately, but what if they send another one? They could close the entire server and we lose all of our services.

Spam lists

Recently we ended up on some spamlists reported as being infected with a malware since again our server seems to want to reach outside sources through some ports, and who knows maybe this is again related to Synapse. We removed our IP from the lists, but we shall see.

A pain in the ass to manage

Not only that there is no easy way to see what users have registered with our Matrix server, but even deleting them is not straight forward. Since Matrix is so popular I can see how some will take advantage of such instances to create spam accounts. What if some were used to spam all kinds of big Matrix channels and our entire instance is blocked on that instance? No idea how we can check that.

On top of this to technically manage this service is a pain. It is the most resource hungry service we use, with a database that is growing nonstop, reaching 300GB currently. To optimize the database takes days and it requires the service to be shut down. To upgrade, backup, restore if needed, can take hours.

Not a necessary service

Anyone can register with Matrix.org and so many other big instances. See https://matrix.org/try-matrix/

When we started to provide this service on TROM.tf the main idea was to have it for our TROM team, but in time it grew and became such a mess.

Solution!

We have migrated our TROM Space (our chatrooms) to matrix.org. So no need to do anything for those who were part of the rooms. You may not even be able to tell that we moved them.

BUT if you have an account with our service (matrix.trom.tf) then you HAVE to move to a different provider.

I (Tio) already have an account with matrix.org and I suggest to anyone who was using our Matrix Instance to go create one there, as it is the main instance and the most reliable one. You can then rejoin our TROM Spaces. Here is the link – https://matrix.to/#/#tromspace:matrix.org

You can even try to migrate your TROM Matrix account to the new one you will create. See this https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration (the easy way) or this https://soupglasses.substack.com/p/migrate-your-existing-matrix-account (a bit more involved).

You can even export your chats (and everything in it) by clicking the “i” info for any room, and then export. Neat!

Conclusion:

Hosting these TROM.tf services is not easy. I (Tio) am basically the only server admin and have to always keep these services and the server up to date, working, safe, reliable. It is like having a bunch of babies that need constant care.

Since our Matrix service is really not a necessity and at the same time a huge pain in the ass to manage, I think it is understandable that we should remove it. We will have more server resources for the other services.

If you need any sort of help, contact us.