The New Leaf Journal became inaccessable for about 1-2 minutes this morning. Fortunately, I opened the site almost immediately when it happened. I opened my server logs and found what was probably the offending bot/scraper so I could block it. I kept the server logs open to watch for any other questionable activity. I saw an interesting user-agent string.

Aug 22 11:22:46 [IP ADDRESS] - - [22/Aug/2025:15:22:46 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 63425 "-" "GodHatesMastodon"

My two sites are often crawled by Mastodon servers and Fediverse-related crawlers because both sites function as ActivityPub servers (you can follow this account on the Fediverse at @naferrell@social.emcafe.org). I had not previously seen the crawler GodHatesMastodon, but I understand through the grapevine that there are some questionable instances out there. Fortunately, there is no reason for anyone to hate The New Leaf Journal. As my friend and colleague Victor V. Gurbo once explained, “The New Leaf Journal is a family website.”