The Curious Case of Missing Mastodon Verification

Verifying yourself on Mastodon is quite simple: just add the following to the tag of your website: Then, add your website to your Mastodon profile, and you should be good to go. That wasn’t the case for me. I added the above link to the header—nothing. I added it to the footer—still nothing. I even tried adding the version as a navigation link in both the top and bottom menus. No luck. I left it overnight. Still no change. Then I thought: If I’ve added my website to my Mastodon profile, I should at least see a Mastodon user-agent in the Apache logs. So, I re-added the website to my profile and checked again. Nothing. Huzzah! A clue. A quick check in Cloudflare revealed the issue: I had enabled Bot Fight Mode. I disabled it, checked the Apache logs again, and immediately saw Mastodon requests: [10/Jul/2025:14:22:51 +0000] "GET /wp-json/activitypub/1.0/actors/0/followers HTTP/1.1" 200 4251 "-" "Mastodon/4.4.1 (http.rb/5.3.1; +https://indieweb.social/)" Shortly after that, my website was verified.