Chinwag News @chinwagnews@chinwag.org

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.

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.

Chinwag Social has added some new moderators!

We live a pretty quiet life around these parts, but it never hurts to get ahead of demand on stuff like this, so please say hi to @Andrea, @rolaveric and @Funkpirata and don't make them work too hard please.

These users are among our longest-active ones, and have defined our culture here on that basis; always relaxed and friendly. The place already pretty much belongs to them on that basis, so it's nice to make it official in some way.

To aid in easy access to Deffo for people wanting to manage their events with us, it's now possible to register and sign in using your Google or Twitter account.

More login methods will be added over time.

Our Australian-based #Mobilizon instance is now up, at https://deffo.com.au - this was originally planned for about a year ago but ... you know, 2020 and all that.

It's now relaunched as Mobilizon recently released 1.0, and so the timing seems about right to do it properly. It's got a few rough edges, and it's not really possible to customise things much right now, but we've got to start somewhere!

We hope this will be a new, permanent Chinwag-provided service. Enjoy!

If you can read this, it's over and we're back!

Chinwag Social will be going down for maintenance very briefly in about 5-10 minutes. Shouldn't take long.

Chinwag Social was down for a little while last night (local time) due to what seems to have been a cascade of one tiny issue leading to a bigger one.

It seems that a low memory situation, possibly triggered when a backup runs, can cause one minor and non essential service to be killed. This leads primarily to a massive increase in log entries generated, which rapidly consumes disk space until it fills up, bringing down everything.

I'll change some alarm thresholds as a result.

I'd like some help related to managing Chinwag's web site. I started typing out a brief description of what I wanted, but realised it was getting rambly so it's on the blog instead:
https://chinwag.im/2020/09/24/help-wanted-maybe/

TL;DR: I'm putting jobs off because I can't make web stuff look good and would like help moving from Wordpress to Hugo or similar. Looking to trade sysadmin skills for your aptitude in web things.

Rewriting the Terms of Service for Chinwag Social is something that's long overdue but has now begun. The current TOS is a bit of a mess that was hastily thrown together about three years ago and doesn't cover much.

If you're keen on discussing this, have any points you'd like to raise, or just want to take a look, there's a forum post for this purpose.

https://discuss.chinwag.org/d/4-usage-policy

Chinwag's aspirational to-do list is now available to the public for anyone curious about future plans and what help might be needed.

This will be an evolving list with suggestions and discussion welcomed.

https://discuss.chinwag.org/d/3-the-wishlist

We're back! Chinwag is now synced up with Mastodon v3.1.5.

Chinwag Social will shut down for a software update about 30 minutes after this post (2pm Melbourne time).

The downtime should only be a few minutes.

We now have (let's call it a beta test) a forum for discussion of Chinwag services and user support.

https://discuss.chinwag.org

An informal forum seemed the best fit to provide access to information for future reference. Feel free to ask about our plans, provide any tips that might help or ask about anything we do that you're unsure of.