Posts by matt_garber@mastodon.sdf.org
 (DIR) Post #AshLs0mGW1S5ckyPo0 by matt_garber@mastodon.sdf.org
       2025-04-03T01:13:30Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jimsalter @spineless_echidna While realizing it’s not perfect for the smaller percentage that lie with old browser versions, I’ve found it *extremely* effective to have a regex block of ~2-3 dozen of the worst behaving offenders that provide no value to me — classic annoyances like MJ12bot and Turnitinbot, to newer Bytespider, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, etc. — that is imported for all my sites in nginx & instantly returns 403 for all reqs. Fast and effective for the largest, low-hanging fruit.
       
 (DIR) Post #AshNavGZx5wRW88DFg by matt_garber@mastodon.sdf.org
       2025-04-03T01:33:04Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @jimsalter @spineless_echidna Yeah, that’s fair enough, and the poisoned dataset methods are enticing, too. FWIW, from the sample of sites I block the UAs for, some fairly high traffic, I haven’t yet seen a *commensurate* offsetting increase in bogus UAs vs. all the requests I still see coming in from their “genuine” crawler identifier (getting denied), that that’s still my primary method and which doesn’t rely on IPs at all. (I also rate limit everything dynamic to keep reqs/s reasonable.)
       
 (DIR) Post #Atb8cJuWkaDz5arTaS by matt_garber@mastodon.sdf.org
       2025-04-29T22:40:24Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @SDF Has the Mastodon instance been offline or behind on database events (e.g., timeline updates) the past ~24ish hours or so due to software updates or server issues? Looks like I’m still ~8h behind current after not seeing any timeline updates for a lot of yesterday.(Also… is there a status page that normally reflects issues or outages outside of normally scheduled maintenance windows that doesn’t itself live within Mastodon posts?)