Follow requests get stuck at pending

[panosda]

Hi, I'm sure there's something that I'm not doing right, but I just installed this plugin to a friend's website, sexpositive.gr. The fedi account is @follow@sexpositive.gr but when I try to follow it (tried from a Firefish and a Sharkey instance) it gets stuck at pending.

Looking at similar past issues I think it might have to do with WebFinger - when I installed the plugin, I had two issues preventing activation, "WebFinger endpoint is not accessible" and "Pretty Permalinks are not enabled". When I fixed the second issue, the first issue went away. After I noticed the problem with following the account, I also installed the WebFinger plugin in case it helped, but nothing changed.

Any ideas for how to fix this? I am not a sysadmin so specific steps would be great =)
TIA!

Edit: On a side note, I tried to follow another wordpress blog just to make sure I can, so I tried @activitypub.blog@activitypub.blog but it wasn't discoverable at all - tried from Firefish, Sharkey and NodeBB... thought it was strange for the official blog of the plugin,

[pfefferle]

I can find the blog on nodeBB: https://community.nodebb.org/user/activitypub.blog@activitypub.blog

[pfefferle]

What Firefish/Sharkey instance have you tried?

[panosda]

Hmm yes I was also able to find it now on NodeBB (although only by typing in the url, not from search) and on Mastodon. Still can't find it on Sharkey and Firefish. Don't bother with Firefish, it's reached EoL anyway, but the Sharkey instance is https://calckey.world/ and is on the latest version. https://calckey.world/@activitypub.blog@activitypub.blog should fetch it, but doesn't.

Any ideas/suggestions for the initial issue with @follow@sexpositive.gr? I tried it from Mastodon too in the meantime, the button turns to "Unfollow" but the follow isn't actually registered, it doesn't appear on my Mastodon profile, or @follow@sexpositive.gr's profile, and I still see 0 followers in the plugin's settings in Wordpress.

Edit: I also managed to fetch recent posts so it seems to have federated properly - except for the fact that it doesn't allow me to follow it from any platform.

Edit2: Another thing I noticed was that posts look great on Mastodon, with just the few first sentences and then a link to the article, but in Sharkey it shows the entire article in fedi: https://calckey.world/notes/ae2khzw0gc - perhaps this should be another issue, or is it something on Sharkey's end?

[pfefferle]

I just tested it on Mastodon with the same result. Your site seem to not accept the POST requests to the inbox. Can you tell me where you host your site?

[panosda]

It's on Hostgator.

[pfefferle]

This could be a general issue. We had several problems with the plugin on HostGator in the past: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/approve-follow-request-redux/

[panosda]

Alright, thanks a lot! I guess there's nothing I can do, it's not my site anyway so changing the host is out of scope. You can close this issue if you want!

[pfefferle]

I can help you to formulate an email you could send to your Hoster!? Maybe that helps?

[panosda]

Oh sure, thanks!