💬 Replied to: Grant Richmond: My New Posting Workflow

“Just wanted to say that I’m enjoying the stuff you’re sharing on Indieweb.xyz! The ‘boots’ quote the other day. A nice contribution to the book quotes sub.

You mentioned having some difficulty with my scraper getting identified as a malicious bot or something—any idea why I might be triggering Wordpress in that way? I can train it better.”

an author ( )

Thanks! I do worry sometimes I’m “the new guy” flooding the site with links every couple of days… ? IndieWeb.xyz has been invaluable to me lately, helping me to explore how people are using IndieWeb ideas and tools – and in giving me some cool stuff to read!

The parsing trouble I was having seems to have been entirely down to the WordFence plugin. It was consistently blocking anything coming from the indieweb.org hosts too. Unfortunately the free version of the plugin doesn’t give the best information or options to diagnose/fix issues. As near as I can tell, the issue seems to have been POST requests made with either a missing referrer or user-agent?

I’ve disabled WordFence for now (I think it was overkill for my little site anyway) and most of my issues have disappeared. I have a lingering issue where sending Webmentions is intermittent, but that’s probably user error on my part 🙂