For a little background: I work in software development currently, though the bulk of my career so far has been in web development. Outside of work, I like messing around with websites anyway so I like to think I have a pretty decent understanding of how these things work.. But even when I don't, I like to learn, which is how I volunteered for Blorbo in the first place!

So: Onto the adventures of what knocked Blorbo offline in the first place, and why it took TWO DAYS to get it back up.

This was, frankly, a weird one to figure out. I've dealt with a lot of bizarre site issues over the years, but this was a surprise.

In the earliest days of Blorbo, we were set up on DigitalOcean. After we moved to Toot.io, we no longer used DigitalOcean, and so it sat quietly for the past few months. Reasonably, the Admin was like “we aren't using this, so I'll delete it.”

And down Blorbo went.

As it turns out, our nameservers were still pointing to DigitalOcean despite having moved to Toot MONTHS ago. I believe DigitalOcean was acting as a weird middle point between the domain registrar and Toot.io.

So this: Domain Registrar → DigitalOcean Nameservers → Toot.io

Became this: Domain Registrar → ???????????????????????????????????????

And our domain was basically not connected to anything anymore.

In theory, we just needed to set the nameservers back to the default ones on the domain registrar and everything should have been fine, but it wasn't!

We were advised to remove all extraneous DNS records that had been added by default by the host, leaving a single “A” Record that pointed to our host. I thought this seemed reasonable... If it's not something we set up on purpose then it's probably not in use or it's part of the problem!

This did not work.

The Admin contacted support at the Registrar since this wasn't something that Jan at Toot.io could fix, and the Admin's attempts at fixing it also didn't work. Support advised waiting up to 48 hours. This is pretty standard advice for domain issues, but I've never had anything domain related take THIS long to update... but maybe this would be the exception that proves the rule. We opted to see if the issue would be resolved with a bit of time.

The issue was ALSO not resolved by time.

So tonight I strapped myself in to REALLY dig into this. At which point, I found that editing records on the registrar's site was... not behaving how I anticipated at all. I couldn't delete and remake records without getting strange errors, like our “A” record was coming up not found even though I was looking at it. So I reached out to support.

The short of that conversation is that the support agent restored all the default records for our domain, except for pointing the “A” Record to Toot.io. I was suspicious, but decided to give this a shot, and waited, attempting to visit Blorbo every few minutes until finally, it worked!! Blorbo was alive!!

To be brutally honest, I'm not sure why this all broke the way that it did. I can see more or less why deleting the DigitalOcean stuff caused problems, but the fact that this turned into SUCH a mess after? I'm baffled! It's either a little above my head, or it was one of those situations with no answer, where the fix is literally “turn it off and on again” or pressing the reset button in our case.

Either way, this was odd enough that I thought it might be useful to document. If you ever find yourself with a very broken website after you delete something that SHOULDN'T have been an issue, I suppose the steps are:

1) Check your nameservers and DNS records. If your Nameservers are pointing to something no longer used, reset them to the default ones.

2) Restore all your default DNS records, or ask support to do so, and then change only the ones that need to be changed. This might be something specific to our registrar—Our host said we only needed the one “A” record to point to Toot.io, and when I asked support at the registrar, they said no, we did in fact need all the default records too... though this wasn't addressed previously.

All's well that ends well, but man. This has been quite the 48 hours.

Here's hoping you don't hear from me again any time soon!

Tabby

PS: It was during this whole adventure that I learned the term “DNS propagation” is a bit of a misnomer! It sounds like you're waiting for servers to get a message from you in order to update your domain records, right? Turns out, any time you're told to wait 24-48 hours for your changes to “propagate” you're actually waiting for a bunch of caches to clear. A difference that makes no difference to most people, but was quite interesting to me! (Source)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The bare minimum

Here's the bare minimum you need to know before you start.

Blorbo.Social is a fandom-focused social community of people with a common interest: fandom. On Blorbo.Social, you can post anything you like (not just fandom stuff), as long as it follows our rules.

Blorbo.Social runs on a platform called Mastodon. There are thousands of Mastodon instances (sometimes called servers) with their own rules, communities and moderation practices. Mastodon instances are (usually) part of a broader network called the Fediverse (more about that another time). You can find, follow and interact with people all over the Fediverse from your Blorbo.Social account.

How to join us

If a friend already on Blorbo.Social has invited you to join us, follow the link they gave you. If not, go to our signup page.

Review our server rules. If you are happy to comply with our rules, click Accept.

Enter the requested information.

If you haven't been invited by an existing member, you'll need to tell us why you want to join Blorbo.Social. (This is mostly to stop spammers and bots from signing up.) As long as you mention something about your fandoms or your blorbos, we're pretty likely to approve your application.

You'll receive a confirmation email. Click the link in the email to confirm and activate your account.

You're in! Go forth and explore.

What to do first

How you set up and use your account is up to you. Here are some things that most people do when they first get started:

• Edit your profile. Upload an avatar and write something in your bio, so that other people get an idea of who you are and what you're most interested in.
• If you want your account to be private, you can select the Require follow requests option. This means that people can't follow you unless you allow it. Anyone will still be able to see your public and unlisted posts, but only your approved followers will see your followers-only posts.
• Check out the timelines:
  • In the Home timeline, you'll see posts from people that you follow. Since you're not following anyone yet, this will probably be empty.
  • In the Local timeline, you can see posts from other Blorbo.Social members.
  • In the Federated timeline, you can see posts from all over the Fediverse (it's a little bit more complicated than that, but don't worry about the details for now).
• If you see a post from someone and you want to see more from that person, click on their profile and select Follow. Their posts will start appearing in your Home timeline.
• Post an introduction post of your own. Use the introduction hashtag if you like. It's also a good idea to list and hashtag some of the topics you're interested in. This helps other people interested in the same topics to find your profile.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

When you create a post on Blorbo.Social, or in other places on the Fediverse, you can tag the post.

In this context, tagging means adding a word or a phrase to your post that other people can use to:

• Filter it out of their feeds, or
• Search for content with that specific tag.

Tags help others filter out content

Whenever you post about topics that other people might find distressing, or even just uninteresting, we encourage you to use words or phrases that other people can filter on.

(To set up your own content filters, go to Preferences > Filters > Add new filter.)

Hashtags help others find content

When you put a hash (#) symbol in front of a word, it becomes a hashtag.

You can search for content using particular hashtags. There is no full-text search in Mastodon. If you want people to find your posts through the search function, use hashtags liberally.

(This has a side benefit: If you don't hashtag key terms, your posts won't appear in search results for those terms, and you're less likely to get haters flocking in to dump on you.)

Each hashtag must be a single string of characters, without spaces or special characters.

If you want to use a hashtag with multiple words, run the words together in CamelCase, so that there are no spaces between the words and each word is capitalized.

(Hashtags still work if you don't use CamelCase, but they're less readable, especially for people who use screen readers.)

You can follow a hashtag, so that any posts containing the hashtag appear in your Home timeline.

What is wrapping?

You can add a content wrapper (CW) to a post, so that the viewer won't see the rest of the content unless they choose to click through.

These are sometimes called content warnings.

Wrapping helps other people manage what they see on their timelines

Many people use CWs to warn other people that a post contains something that they might not want to see right now (or ever).

However, you can also use CWs to:

• Hide spoilers for a show, book, or game
• Conceal the punchline of a joke
• Provide a read-more link for especially long posts.

You can also configure your own filters to automatically put CWs on certain types of content.

Tagging and wrapping examples

To help people filter a post, use words or phrases that people are likely to want to filter on. They don't have to be formatted as hashtags, but they can be if you want.

Examples: uspol, auspol, wordle, nsfw, rpf, addiction.

To help people find a post, use hashtags and CamelCase.

Examples: #MyBlorbo, #MyFandom, #OnlyOneBed, #FicRec, #BDSM.

To wrap a post with a CW, put enough words in the CW to help people decide if they want to see the post at all, and if they want to see it right now.

(I might be very keen to see your explicit fanart of my favorite blorbo, but I'm not going to look at it on a crowded train!)

Examples:

• explicit fanart of My Blorbo, nudity, masturbation, blindfold
• discussion of dark themes in fanfic, including incest, abuse

Hashtags don't work within CW text, but you can still use any relevant hashtags within the body of the post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.