Warming up

What it's for

A brand-new Account is cold — no cookies, no history, nothing on its proxy that looks like a real person has ever used it. Sites treat a cold account with more suspicion, and on drop day that suspicion is the last thing you want. Warming fixes that: Umbra opens each selected Account in its own sealed session — its proxy, its fingerprint — in hidden background tabs, and browses like a person would, so the Account and the proxy behind it build a believable history before it matters.

Everything it collects is real. It never writes a fake "warmth" score; the cookies are the site's own, in the Account's own session. Come here the day before a drop, or any time you spin up new Accounts.

Pick a style

The Style dropdown on the Warm tool (and on a scheduled warm-up) sets how deep the session goes:

• Light — a quick top-up. A handful of everyday sites, a scroll and a pause on each. About 3 minutes per Account.
• Thorough — a fuller history. The same everyday sites, following a few links deeper into them, and sitting on a video for a spell. About 8 minutes per Account. This is the default, and what the one-click warm on the Go screen runs.
• Ticketmaster — like Thorough, but it also browses real Ticketmaster events. Use it deliberately: browsing Ticketmaster adds to that Account's heat (see Account Heat) and can run into the same walls a real session does — so a believable general history is usually what keeps an Account looking un-cold, not Ticketmaster traffic. The option carries that caveat on screen.
• Custom (advanced) — your own list of sites and a fixed dwell per site, the way warming worked before the styles existed. Nothing was taken away.

Whatever the style, warming only ever browses — it scrolls, reads, follows ordinary links and dwells. It never fills a cart or approaches a checkout, and it stops the moment a page turns into a block or a challenge rather than hammering at it.

When it runs

Warm the selected Accounts on the spot from the Fleet tools, or schedule a warm-up for an Account group at a set time — the night before a drop, say — so a fleet prepares itself hands-free. An Account that's currently holding a queue place or a live cart is skipped: warming drives traffic down the same proxy, and that is not something to do to an Account mid-drop.

The whole fleet at once

Warming runs your selected Accounts in parallel, not one after another — each in its own sealed session, all building history together. A fleet that used to warm one at a time now finishes in about the time a single Account takes, not that time multiplied by however many you picked.

Parallel doesn't mean identical, though, and that matters. Umbra spreads the starts across a short window so your Accounts don't all land on the same site in the same second — a burst of brand-new sessions arriving in lockstep is itself a pattern, however well each one is isolated on its own proxy and fingerprint. Each Account begins at its own moment and then follows its own randomised browse, so what a site sees is ordinary traffic that happens to arrive around the same time, not a coordinated wave.

Past a large selection — more than ten Accounts — Umbra checks with you first, because every Account warming at once is a live background browser on your machine, and enough of them will slow it down. You choose: all at once, or a few at a time (the rest wait their turn and start as each one finishes). Ten or fewer, it just runs.

Knowing it worked

Warming isn't a tick you take on trust. Each Account keeps a short line of what its last warm-up actually did — how many pages it browsed and how many cookies it picked up, and when — and the Go screen reads an Account as ready, stale (warmed, but long enough ago that the session may have lapsed), didn't take (it ran but collected nothing), or never warmed. A scheduled warm-up records the same proof as a manual one, so a fleet you warmed overnight reads as prepared in the morning.

The claim stays honest: a deeper style gives you more evidence behind the same word, never a stronger one. "Ready" means what it always meant.

When a warm doesn't finish clean

A warm-up doesn't always run to the end, and when it doesn't, the result tells you why rather than going quiet. Each Account reports how it ended, with the cookies-and-pages evidence right beside the reason:

So a warm that stopped short still tells you exactly how far it got and what got in the way — no more staring at a spinner wondering whether it's working.