Chinwag News @chinwagnews@chinwag.org

Hi new users and friends! Just wanted to mention that Chinwag's published rules have been mid-rewrite for a while now.

While there are not many major changes, we are adding an explicit mention of automatic cross-posting from other services at a "generally frowned upon" level. We don't want to see accounts generating a ton of traffic if nobody is actually using them and present on the service.

So just a heads-up on that, please DM this account if you have questions.

Hi, new people of Chinwag! Just a note to say that we don't jump quickly into software updates around here and if you're hearing about new features in some version of Mastodon you might not see it for a bit.

Also if you signed up via an app, we'd strongly encourage you taking a look via the web at https://social.chinwag.org once in a while as things are exposed a little differently in both and you might find new things there.

Welcome aboard, however you come in though!

Benevolent dictator Mike here.

My budget is going to be tight for a while, and while there's no danger to Chinwag, support would be more appreciated than ever.

https://liberapay.com/chinwag

If you can't, don't. It's cool. We'll still be here for you.

We do have a supplemental service at feedtube.com that is available exclusively to Chinwag users where you can add any RSS feed from a blog or whatever and it'll become something you can follow and interact with here as a user.

We'd strongly recommend using something like that over a cross-posting tool.

If you want help with anything like this, please don't hesitate to ask!

Hi new users and friends! Just wanted to mention that Chinwag's published rules have been mid-rewrite for a while now.

While there are not many major changes, we are adding an explicit mention of automatic cross-posting from other services at a "generally frowned upon" level. We don't want to see accounts generating a ton of traffic if nobody is actually using them and present on the service.

So just a heads-up on that, please DM this account if you have questions.

We've requested that Chinwag Social no longer be listed as an available instance on the Join Mastodon site. This does not mean we're going anywhere, just that we'd prefer more organic growth.

If you're one of our users, please consider inviting your friends or family to join us! You can generate handy links for that here: https://social.chinwag.org/invites

Direct registration is still open for anyone visiting the site though, and there are no plans to change that at this time.

Hi, new people of Chinwag! Just a note to say that we don't jump quickly into software updates around here and if you're hearing about new features in some version of Mastodon you might not see it for a bit.

Also if you signed up via an app, we'd strongly encourage you taking a look via the web at https://social.chinwag.org once in a while as things are exposed a little differently in both and you might find new things there.

Welcome aboard, however you come in though!

Chinwag Social is currently closed to new registrations due to some bizarre IRC drama related bots signing up everywhere. What is this, 1995?

If you want a new account just hold your horses for a bit. We'll be down the pub waiting for all this to blow over.

Chinwag Social's code has just been synced up with Mastodon 3.3.2. Please report any issues you might see to us, but we expect this change to be fairly uneventful!

The RSS to ActivityPub service on https://feedtube.com is now set to allow feed additions by Chinwag Social users. If there's an RSS feed you're keen to follow via your Chinwag account, please feel free to log in and add it!

Chinwag messaging users - access to Libera Chat channels via the Chinwag IRC gateways should now be reliable. Please let us know if there are any issues!

Chinwag Social had a short outage just now. The main server was restarted after an issue with media uploads became apparent. The cause of this is not known, but seems to be resolved.

Please give us a shout if you experience any further issues like this today.

Six years ago today, Chinwag's XMPP messaging services went online and opened to the public. Things have diversified quite a bit since then but that's where it all started. Happy birthday to us!

Messaging services via chinwag.im will be down for a while for migration to a new server. It's not expected to take long, but DNS changes may take a while to propagate.

This will not affect anything on chinwag.org, Social has no planned maintenance right now.

Chinwag Social is now synced with Mastodon 3.3.0, and the Android app update based on Tusky 14 is live on the Play Store.

The best new feature with these versions is the ability to turn on notifications for any user's posts that you don't want to miss. Just click the little bell icon on their profile to be alerted when they update!

Chinwag Social had some unexpected downtime tonight, as a planned update that was expected to take a few minutes ended up uncovering an issue that wasn't detected in testing.

We're back now, and the service is being watched closely.

Deffo, our Mobilizon instance, has been updated to 1.0.5. While it's not really going to be considered to be "launched" until there's a bit more support for customisation, it can be relied upon not to vanish without warning.

https://deffo.com.au

Some physical servers need to be relocated, and as a result some minor Chinwag services may be offline for the next few hours.

This won't affect Chinwag Social or chinwag.im messaging, but some experimental stuff or web sites may go offline and I'm not doing a thorough list because it shouldn't be for long.

Basically if you notice something of ours is down or slow tonight, it's probably because of this and it'll be fixed soon I promise.

Chinwag Social is now synced with Mastodon 3.2.2.
https://social.chinwag.org

Deffo has been updated to Mobilizon 1.0.3.
https://deffo.com.au

Three years ago today, https://social.chinwag.org came online! Thanks to all the great people who've come to hang out with us during that time, we're looking forward to heaps more new friends in the years to come.