Block Together

Posted an update at blocktogether.org: I'm gradually shutting down Block Together over the next few months. New signups are turned off now, but existing blocklists will work through the end of July.

To be clear: Everyone you currently block will stay blocked, unless you unblock them or the maintainer of a blocklist you subscribe to unblocks them.

Posted an update at blocktogether.org: I'm gradually shutting down Block Together over the next few months. New signups are turned off now, but existing blocklists will work through the end of July.

@NYCGovCuomo No, the people you currently have blocked will stay blocked unless you unblock them via the Twitter app.

I know this will be a disappointment to many people who rely on Block Together, and I'm sorry.

I'm sad to be putting this project behind me, and disappointed that Twitter hasn't picked up this functionality and improved on it, but I am happy to have helped protect people against some of the abuse on Twitter, for a little while.

@cassolotl blocktogether.org/shutdown.html

@blocktogether I can't see the update on blocktogether.org, it's just all the usual info. Is there a blog post URL or something?

@LeilaWarlock Possibly! I'd like to add that feature but I really have very little time to work on this lately. Stability first.

Fixed some problems that had been preventing list updates. The problems have two causes: - After a recent upgrade, components seem to be taking up more memory and crashing. I've made some tweaks to limit memory use that will hopefully help. - The database keeps filling up.

My current plan is to start deleting old Actions on accounts with more than 50,000 entries in the table. As a result, unblocking will change slightly: If a list you follow unblocks someone, you will also unblock them, regardless of whether you originally blocked due to that list.

The biggest table in the database is the Actions log for each user. This list provides transparency, and is also used for bookkeeping when processing unblocks. However, it seems likely that the Actions log is not useful for users with hundreds of thousands of blocks.

Also, for users with more than 250k actions in their history, Block Together will start deleting older actions from the history list (the blocks will stay in place).

I will also be changing Block Together so it won't update your blocks and send out subscriptions if you have more than 125k blocks. This should somewhat slow the growth in database size and make resource planning easier.

Block Together now has 150,000 users! I'm making a few changes to be able to serve more users.

@KenCopen @shannoncoulter They will, it's just taking a little while. Apologies for the delay.

@shannoncoulter FYI: Unchecking the subscription does not automatically unblock everyone from that subscription. If you want your account to process the unblocks, better to stay subscribed until they are done.

Good news: Block Together is back up! Sounds like the system got a bit overwhelmed, which I guess will happen when 80k people do anything! You have 2 options: sit back, relax & let the unblocks propagate or log into @BlockTogether, go to "Subscriptions" & uncheck "shannoncoulter"

.@Jack, from the bottom of my heart: thank you. This will make the lives of a lot of people tangibly better. I will now unblock every company on the #BlockParty500 list. All: if you've been manually blocking as a part of this effort, pls. manually unblock. buzzfeednews.com/article/charli…

If you got errors accessing the site this morning, they've now been resolved. The database blocked the web frontend due to too many connection errors.