Our first office hours went great! @pfefferle and I helped @andyrush from UNF to debug why his posts weren’t being sent to followers from his subsite.
The problem was that his site was blocking author profile URLs.
In ActivityPub for WordPress, we have three modes: authors, blog, or both.
If both are enabled, the blog profile will boost the author profile’s post (it can only be attributed to one of them). But since the author profile URL was blocked, the remote server was rejecting the post as invalid.
curl -I -H "Accept: application/activity+json"
\ https://andy.domains.unf.edu/\?author\=1
HTTP/2 404
What’s going on there? That should return some json. But it’s being blocked before the request can be handled by the ActivityPub plugin. Probably some sort of folk wisdom in WP security that user IDs in WP installs need to be private.
We were able to resolve the problem by enabling the Blog profile only mode. Now, all posts are attributed to the blog profile, which is not blocked. Most sites only need the blog profile, but some will prefer per-author profiles. We give you that flexibility and it came in handy that we didn’t need it when it wasn’t working. Pragmatic solutions ftw.
More Office Hours
We’re going to keep doing these all week, alternating between joint sessions with both Matthias and myself, and each of us going solo more in the middle of the day in Europe and North America, respectively.
Just me: Nov 26 (Tue) and 28 (Thu), 3pm ET/12pm PT/20:00 UTC.
Both of us: Nov 27 (Wed) 10:30 ET/7:30 PT/15:30 UTC
Looking forward to connecting with more of you! Follow for updates with Zoom links.
You can also find us in the .org forums or on Github.
mattwiebe.blog 
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