Why access from Mississippi is currently blocked
Mississippi's HB1126 imposes new obligations on services that let people create profiles and post content for others to see (like message boards and group feeds). Among other things, it requires age collection and "commercially reasonable" age verification for account creation, parental consent workflows for known minors, and a documented plan to mitigate specified harms to minors.
We support child safety online. However, as a small team operating a community platform, building and maintaining Mississippi-specific age-assurance and consent infrastructure would require collecting sensitive data and significant ongoing effort. To avoid compliance risk while courts review the law, we've chosen the lowest-impact interim step: geoblocking Mississippi web/app access.
References:
What still works Email is unaffected
- You can keep participating entirely by email. Reply to group emails as usual to post to the group.
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Subscribe/unsubscribe by email:
send an email to
GROUPNAME+subscribe@groups.ioorGROUPNAME+unsubscribe@groups.io. - Digest and delivery settings can be changed by replying to a settings email or contacting your group owner/moderator.
Web, mobile app, and API access from Mississippi IP addresses are blocked. Email (SMTP) delivery is separate and continues to function.
People accessing Groups.io from IP addresses located in Mississippi are blocked from the website, mobile app, and API. If you're a Mississippi resident traveling out-of-state, you'll be able to use the site normally from where you are.
We intend this to be temporary. We'll re-evaluate as the legal landscape evolves or if we implement compliant age-assurance that doesn't require your government ID or other sensitive data.
FAQ
Why block instead of adding age verification? Implementing Mississippi-specific age assurance and parental consent flows would require collecting sensitive data and significant engineering and operational overhead. As a small team, we chose the least intrusive temporary option while courts review the law.
Does the law cover email? The statute targets services that let users create profiles and post content visible to others. It expressly excludes services that only facilitate email or direct messaging. Groups.io includes web-based group features, so we're blocking Mississippi web/app access while keeping email available.
Can I use a VPN? Our block is IP-based and not perfect, but we ask members to respect it while we sort out a sustainable, privacy-preserving approach.
Will you store my ID? No. We are not collecting government IDs for age verification.
Technical details
- HTTP responses to blocked traffic may return
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons. - Blocks apply to Mississippi-geolocated IPs across web, API, and mobile app. Email (SMTP) routing is unaffected.
Contact us at support@groups.io. If you're a group owner dealing with Mississippi members, include "MS access" in your subject line for faster routing.
We support an open, privacy-respecting Internet. If you'd like to help defend it, consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that fights for digital civil liberties and against online censorship and surveillance (we're not affiliated, but we are fans).