And we're back. Thanks y'all! #admin

Woof.group will be unavailable for a few minutes while we apply a security fix. Shouldn't be gone long! #admin

And we're back. There's some big new features in 4.5.0, which we've had a preview of the last few weeks:

- Quote boosts. You can also set whether or not your account, or specific post, enables quoting.

- Reply backfill. Mastodon has struggled with this for years--when you loaded a post from a different server, you'd only see the replies that woof.group knew about, and miss replies we hadn't fetched yet. Now woof.group will automatically fetch replies.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/mastodon-4.5/

#admin

Hey woofers, in a few minutes we're gonna be down for just a second--upgrading to 4.5.0. 🙂

#admin

And we're back! We have quote-toots now: when you hit the boost button on a toot, you'll get a little drop-down for it. 🙂

#admin

First phase complete. Working on the 4.5 upgrade now; we'll have one more bout of brief downtime. #admin

Still working on that upgrade. This one involves a fair number of changes, so it may take a while. #admin

Hey there woofers! We'll be going down for a Mastodon upgrade in a little over three hours, at 12:00 US Central. Should hopefully be a brief interruption, and bring a few new features. #admin

It, uh, appears likely that essentially everyone who operates a web site that uses email addresses is now exposed to legal risk under #HB1126. There are narrow carve-outs in the bill for e.g. sports and news services. However, from talking with the lawyers, it seems likely that most Fediverse admins are in the same boat here: you'll have to weigh the likelihood of a lawsuit against breaking service for some of your users.

Argh.

Woof.group will block traffic from Mississippi IP addresses beginning October 17, 2025. Users in Mississippi should download their account archives and prepare for the site to be unreachable at the end of next week.

https://blog.woof.group/announcements/woof-group-will-block-mississippi

#admin

@MelkyWay @zero Whole companies have sprung up around providing infrastructure for scraping: https://scrapfly.io/blog/posts/top-5-residential-proxy-providers. You can pay https://brightdata.com/ to farm out your scraping to 7 million phones, or 150 million residential IP proxies. https://oxylabs.io/ offers "ethical" scraping via 175 million residential and 20 million phone proxies. Many of these providers run real browsers with JS environments to defeat anti-bot mechanisms like Anubis. This is not a game worth playing.

@MelkyWay @zero If you're playing along at home, IP blocks were sort of effective back in ~2005, but modern scraping campaigns aren't limited to predictable IP space. Scrapers farm out workloads to huge numbers of machines across e.g. EC2 spot instances and residential proxies--compromised IOT devices, phone apps, desktop machines, etc. Request rates can be as low as a single request per IP. It's effectively impossible to block these without breaking access for legitimate users.

@MelkyWay @zero 🙄

@MelkyWay @zero Yeah, I've opted not to play the IP whack-a-mole game. May help, but a lot of scrapers get farmed out to random cloud and domestic IP space. Just not something I have enough time to keep up with.

@zero @MelkyWay https://blog.woof.group/docs/faq talks about this a bit. While we suspend threads.net, there's nothing we can really do to prevent Meta, or any other sufficiently motivated party, from scraping woof.group content. It's a public web site.

We've had a few reports today about sketchy accounts DMing users, telling them they have to "verify their account" by going to some weird URL. Yup, these are scams! You can help by hitting the "report post" button; we'll suspend the account. #admin

We're limiting mostr.pub today; had a string of incidents with homophobic harassment from there, almost no accounts there followed, and the impedance mismatch with ActivityPub is pretty significant. #admin

@RubberSD Would you mind sending an email to admin@woof.group, and we'll get you sorted out? I can reset your password again, but I should also note the email backlog is pretty deep--I'm getting emails tonight about mod reports five days ago ;-)

Yup,. DIgitalOcean just decided to block all customers' outbound access to port 587, and... opted not to tell us? Wild. Service restored, emails should be going out again. #admin

Woof.group email has been down for several days. It looks like DigitalOcean may be blocking outbound connections on port 587, which took out our ability to talk to our SMTP relay. We've got a ticket open with DO to see if they can fix it. #admin