[{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/tags/birthday/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"birthday"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories"},{"content":"I’m just scraping in with about an hour to spare here – I planned a much bigger post, with lots of reflection about where we’ve been and where we’re going. A summary of some notable events maybe … but today turned out to be really busy and lots of work happened instead.\nAnyway, today marks four years of Chinwag’s XMPP service being up, and next month we’re coming up on two years of our Mastodon instance being live.\nConsidering Chinwag started out as a reference deployment for a series of tutorial blog posts, it’s all going rather well!\n","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/2019/05/13/happy-4th-birthday/","section":"News","summary":"I’m just scraping in with about an hour to spare here – I planned a much bigger post, with lots of reflection about where we’ve been and where we’re going.","title":"Happy 4th Birthday!"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/categories/news/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"News"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/news/","section":"News","summary":"","title":"News"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2019","permalink":"/tags/xmpp/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"xmpp"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2018","permalink":"/tags/features/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"features"},{"content":"","date":"13 May, 2018","permalink":"/tags/status/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"status"},{"content":"This is just a really quick post because it’d suck to not post this on May 13, and there’s only three hours of that left where I’m sitting. Happy Birthday, Chinwag!\nIt’s been three whole years since the final part of the “How to set up a public XMPP server” series of articles that Chinwag was the example for was published, and it went live.\nWe gained a few users quite rapidly, and kept updating and adding features to stay on top of developing standards and keeping the best chat clients as well supported as possible.\nWe outgrew the original (very cheap) VPS we were using pretty rapidly, settling eventually at Vultr which has been working really well, while allowing us to keep things deployed on servers physically located in Australia.\nWhile we’ve got no shortage of foreign users, providing communication services for Australians has been our primary goal the whole time, given the complete lack of anyone else really doing that. The old “jabber.org.au” service was in disrepair when we started and it’s completely vaporised as of 2018. There was no other XMPP service operating in Australia that we could find at the time, and that still seems to be the case.\nWhile there’s no critical need for low latency that’d prevent anyone here from using a server for messaging anywhere else in the world, it’s always nice to have something local – for the sake of getting a support response if you need one, if nothing else.\nAside from XMPP, in the last year or so we’ve added Chinwag Images and Chinwag Social to scratch a couple of personal itches for services and toys to play with, which are running nicely and also are the first things we’ve moved to the new domain name chinwag.org which wasn’t available three years ago, but freed up since!\nAnyway, come by the Chinwag Lobby chat room and say hello if you’re one of our users who’s been around for a while. It’d be nice to catch up.\n","date":"13 May, 2018","permalink":"/2018/05/13/three-years-of-chinwag/","section":"News","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s been three whole years since the final part of the \u0026ldquo;How to set up a public XMPP server\u0026rdquo; series of articles that Chinwag was the example for was published, and it went live.","title":"Three Years of Chinwag!"},{"content":"Happy New Year, for a start! Hope you’re having a good one so far!\nIn a couple of months, it’ll be three years since Chinwag went live. It started out as a tutorial on how to set up your own XMPP server, and I nearly shut it down at the end of writing that. Instead, I left it running and it started attracting users almost immediately. I got a lot of positive feedback as I don’t do things that lead to a lot of downtime, even if I do occasionally reboot things to enable a feature that really should go through some kind of testing first …\nChinwag has also changed over the last few years from being exclusively a host for XMPP messaging, to add Chinwag Images, and most recently Chinwag Social, a Mastodon instance in a large and growing federated network. This has started to make the whole question of “What is Chinwag?” keep coming up in my mind and looking for an answer.\nThis is the year I hope to figure that out! I know one thing I’d really like is a bit more centralisation of accounts, and looking for a good back end to base a common set of credentials on for all services would be a good start. While centralising the accounts here, I’m always keen to learn more about other decentralised services on the net, and which ones would be cool to participate in. I’d like to get more Australians out on these networks, so figuring out how to actually publicise open and free services is something I’m thinking about.\nI’ve also obtained the domain chinwag.org, and services will be transitioning to that from chinwag.im over this year. Maybe with the exception of the XMPP service, which I might leave on the .im domain as a standalone service for those who want simple messaging services and nothing else.\nI hope you’ll come hang out on Chinwag Social if you want to have a chat with me about what this little corner of the net can do for you.\n","date":"8 January, 2018","permalink":"/2018/01/08/chinwag-in-2018/","section":"News","summary":"Happy New Year, for a start!","title":"Chinwag in 2018"},{"content":"","date":"8 January, 2018","permalink":"/tags/discussion/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"discussion"},{"content":"","date":"8 January, 2018","permalink":"/categories/status/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Status"},{"content":"The initial version of our local user guide for Chinwag Social, our Mastodon instance, is now live.\nGetting Social You can sign up at https://social.chinwag.org/about – please let us know if there is anything else you’d like covered in the guide.\n","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/2017/12/22/chinwag-social/","section":"News","summary":"The initial version of our local user guide for Chinwag Social, our Mastodon instance, is now live.","title":"Chinwag Social"},{"content":"","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/categories/features/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Features"},{"content":"","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/tags/mastodon/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"mastodon"},{"content":"","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/tags/social-networking/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"social networking"},{"content":"","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/tags/software/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"software"},{"content":" The Signup Form What is Chinwag Social? Chinwag Social is our local Mastodon instance. Mastodon is Twitter-style social networking combined with email-style instanced servers. Chinwag Social accounts are not linked to Chinwag Messaging accounts at this time – note they use the chinwag.org domain, and not chinwag.im. It’s intended that Social accounts should also be usable as XMPP accounts, but this has not been implemented just yet.\nHow is it like Twitter? You post relatively-short status updates, and you can see a streaming list of your friends’ status updates. You can keep notifications (replies, boosts, favorites, and DMs) in a separate column.\nChinwag Social’s statuses are called “toots”, like Twitter’s are called “tweets”. A toot can be up to 500 characters long.\nChinwag Social also supports hashtags, which are words prefixed by #, like “#gameing” or “#pineapple”. You can click on a hashtag to search for other posts containing that tag.\nHow is it like email? Each Mastodon instance is independent but networked, like email servers. If you sign up for an email account on gmail.com, you don’t automatically have an account on hotmail.com or aol.com, but you can send and receive messages to and from users on hotmail.com and aol.com.\nLikewise, if you sign up for an account on social.chinwag.org, that doesn’t make an account for you on every other instance, but you can talk to users from other instances and they can talk to you.\nYou can make accounts on multiple instances if you want to talk about different things separately. You could have an account on https://cybre.space to talk about technology, an account on https://elekk.xyz to talk about gaming, and an account on https://social.chinwag.org for general chatter. You have to sign into each account separately, and keep each open in a separate browser tab or window.\nKeep in mind that in general, when talking about Mastodon, “instance” and “server” mean the same thing.\nHow is it not like either of those? Chinwag Social has two additional timelines that you can view: the Local timeline and the Federated timeline.\nThe Local timeline is every post with a public status posted by users on your instance, with the exception of replies. (A reply is any toot posted in response to another toot – NOT any toot that simply mentions another user!)\nThe Federated timeline is every post with a public status posted by any user that your instance knows about, even from other instances. Your instance knows about a remote user if at least one user on your instance has EVER followed them.\n## How do I mention someone who’s not on my instance?\nMastodon usernames take the form @username@instance. Your local admin’s account on social.chinwag.im is @mike@chinwag.im; his account on mastodon.xyz is @bremensaki@mastodon.xyz. If you’re mentioning someone on a different instance, you have to type the whole thing (although the toot input box will help you auto-complete the username if it’s a name the instance knows already).\nIf you’re mentioning someone on your own instance, you just have to type the first part; if you’re on social.chinwag.im, @mike will get to Mike just like @mike@chinwag.im will. If you leave off the “@instance” Mastodon understands that you want to talk to the local user.\nWhat are the rules? Chinwag Social has its community guidelines posted at https://social.chinwag.org/about/more. This is deliberately very light, as we try to be hands-off on our user communications, but at the same time we’re not free speech absolutists. Don’t be a dick to other people and make us come over there.\nAs for other instances, we might go so far as to block an entire other instance if their users turn out to be incompatible with our instance’s values and the good of our users and the other instance’s moderators won’t help. At this time we have not blocked any other instance, nor do we intend to.\nHow do privacy settings work? Under each post you’ll see three icons: a camera, a globe or a padlock, and the letters “CW”. Click on the globe or padlock to choose the privacy settings for your post.\nPublic means that everyone can see your post. Unlisted means that everyone can see your post, but it won’t appear on the public timelines – either Local or Federated. Anyone who follows you or views your profile can see the toot, though. Followers-Only means that only people who follow you and people mentioned in the post can see your post. If someone who doesn’t follow you views your profile, they won’t see this post. Private means that only people who are mentioned in your post can see it. Keep in mind that some servers, which run software that’s compatible with but not the same as Mastodon, will ignore these privacy settings if you send a message to their users, so be careful!\nWhat does “CW” mean? CW stands for Content Warning. It hides your post behind text (which you get to choose); it’s like a Read More link.\nYou might use CWs for:\nPolitics Sex Gross topics Common phobias, like spiders or blood Health discussions Punchlines to jokes Long posts that might otherwise fill up people’s timelines In general, just use your best judgment; think “is there a reason someone might not want to see this?”.\nI just attached a picture to my toot. What’s with the new ‘eye’ icon? Clicking that will hide your image behind a “Sensitive content” overlay. This is good for nudity, gore and violence, political topics, etc.\nYou’ll notice that if you have both an image and a CW on a toot, the “Sensitive content” overlay is turned on automatically and can’t be turned off. That’s on purpose.\nHow come my friend on another instance can use this emoji, but I can’t? Each instance can define custom emoji for their users to use, and many have taken advantage of this. We can copy emoji that we like from other instances if requested. If you see an emoji that you like and it’s not available on your instance, ask us to copy it over.\nI like Mastodon and I want to use it on my phone Mastodon has a responsive design, so you can use it in your phone’s browser. Alternately, there are many apps available for Mastodon. The most widely-used are Tusky and Subway Tooter for Android, and Amaroq and Tootdon for iOS.\nI have other questions Ask around! People are usually pretty happy to answer questions and help out. If you really get stuck, ask Mike: https://social.chinwag.org/@mike\nCredit This document was heavily based on the excellent “A brief introduction to Mastodon” by @noelle@elekk.xyz and used with permission. Feel free to create further derivatives!\n","date":"22 December, 2017","permalink":"/social/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"Chinwag Social is our local Mastodon instance. Mastodon is Twitter-style social networking combined with email-style instanced servers. An account here allows you to share and interact with thousands of other similar services. You can use it via a clean web interface, or download and use one of many apps for mobile devices.","title":"Getting Social"},{"content":"","date":"26 November, 2017","permalink":"/tags/encryption/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"encryption"},{"content":"When Chinwag first went live, we made the decision to be as current with our use of standard XMPP features as possible. We still do this. Your experience when using a Chinwag account for communication should give you the best experience possible with whatever client software you chose. However, we also recognised that not the whole federated network of servers out there in the world was totally up to date in the same way and there’s not a lot we could do about that.\nSo, with that situation in mind, we made the decision to be highly liberal about what we’d accept from a peer, while preferring best practices ourselves. The main peer we had in mind when setting this policy back then was Google Talk, which did not mandate encryption for server-to-server communications while the rest of the world had gone down that path. We figured at the time that cutting off Google and any other server was not a good idea, especially as there was no reliable mechanism to communicate to the end user that this was happening.\nOf course, Google have since cut themselves off, and the proliferation of poorly-maintained and implemented servers out there are proving a fantastic environment for abuse and spam. Our configuration is being revisited as a result.\nFrom this week, we will be getting very strict about the standards of services we federate with. Invalid or expired certificates will no longer be accepted and support for some older encryption standards will be dropped. This will cause some contacts you may have to become unreachable. Please let us know if this happens. We’ll try to contact other server admins where possible and see if we can resolve issues.\n","date":"26 November, 2017","permalink":"/2017/11/26/getting-strict/","section":"News","summary":"From this week, we will be getting very strict about the standards of services we federate with. Invalid or expired certificates will no longer be accepted and support for some older encryption standards will be dropped.","title":"Getting Strict"},{"content":"","date":"26 November, 2017","permalink":"/tags/policy/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"policy"},{"content":"A few updates, and some new features have been added to the Chinwag stable. We’re always looking for new ways to communicate with people, and we’ll deploy anything that looks promising in that regard to have a bit of a play around with. As of now we’ve got the following services freely available to anyone to use.\nChinwag Messaging: our instant messaging service is the primary reason we’re here and isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. Use the Movim web client, or any XMPP-compatible chat program on desktop or mobile platforms.\nChinwag Social: a Mastodon instance, a globally federated social network. Discuss and share anything, find new friends, post away!\nChinwag Discussions: our latest toy, a Discourse deployment that’s more of a traditional web forum. We’ll be using that for support and site news discussions to keep that content local, instead of using an outside service like Disqus which we’ve had previously.\nChinwag Images: Simple image hosting, like Imgur, upload and link your pictures on Chinwag services, or anywhere.\n","date":"23 October, 2017","permalink":"/2017/10/23/current-chinwag-services/","section":"News","summary":"A few updates, and some new features have been added to the Chinwag stable. Here\u0026rsquo;s an updated list of everything we have running right now.","title":"Current Chinwag Services"},{"content":"","date":"23 October, 2017","permalink":"/tags/discourse/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"discourse"},{"content":"","date":"23 October, 2017","permalink":"/tags/forums/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"forums"},{"content":"","date":"23 October, 2017","permalink":"/tags/images/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"images"},{"content":"Despite our Prime Minister’s recent comments that “the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia” and that they believe that it’s apparently possible override the mathematical principles behind encryption with legislation, we at ChinWag would like to assure our users that we will continue to be bound by reality.\nChinWag exists to provide free and open communication tools for Australians, hosted and maintained in Australia. As such we may at some point be subject to theoretical future legislation that compels us to provide access to any messages that transit through our servers. We will cooperate as far as we are legally required to do so in such circumstances. While we do not explicitly set out to log or store user messages in general, some user-selectable options will preserve copies on our systems.\nWith this in mind, we strongly recommend the use of client software that supports end-to-end encryption. Conversations, ChatSecure and Gajim for a start, are all good clients that have the ability to enable OMEMO for secure communication on a one-to-one or group chat basis. If you do this, we just cannot provide access to your unencrypted messages to anyone, and no amount of legislation will change that.\nIf you have questions about how this might affect you, and how you can secure your messaging, feel free to discuss this in our (unencrypted) Lobby channel in a general, abstract and theoretical way and we’ll do our best to provide non-committal and vague but informative answers.\n","date":"14 July, 2017","permalink":"/2017/07/14/chinwag-will-obey-the-laws-of-mathematics/","section":"News","summary":"Despite recent comments that \u0026ldquo;the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia\u0026rdquo; and that legislation could override mathematical principles, we would like to assure our users that we will continue to obey the latter.","title":"ChinWag Will Obey the Laws of Mathematics"},{"content":"About two months ago, there was a big buzz that built up around Mastodon, a decentralised social network. I was really busy with the Melbourne Comedy Festival at the time, and didn’t get to take a look. I’ve had a look now, and taken advantage of the recent ChinWag server upgrade and extra resources to deploy an instance of it.\nYou can sign up and start using it here: https://social.chinwag.im/\nThere’s currently no integration with the XMPP server, as far as accounts go. I’d really like the logins to be the same for both, if someone chooses to use either one or the other. I’ll look into how to approach that soon if I get time.\nNobody may ever use it and I’ll quietly decommission it in a year, or maybe everyone will get on and discover it’s just what they wanted. One way to find out, right?\nSample Mastodon Posts Nothing found. Nothing found. ","date":"27 June, 2017","permalink":"/2017/06/27/mastodon-deployed/","section":"News","summary":"About two months ago, there was a big buzz that built up around Mastodon, a decentralised social network.","title":"Mastodon Deployed"},{"content":"","date":"27 June, 2017","permalink":"/tags/testing/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"testing"},{"content":"","date":"27 June, 2017","permalink":"/tags/updates/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"updates"},{"content":"","date":"21 January, 2017","permalink":"/tags/expiry/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"expiry"},{"content":"ChinWag is coming up on two years old now, so there are a few “I’ll worry about that later” jobs that I now need to start worrying about. Inactive account handling is one that’ll need to be settled soon.\nI originally thought about never expiring accounts, simply on the basis that it avoids potential impersonation issues whereby someone re-registering an expired ID can potentially receive messages not intended for them. I’m coming around to believing that that’s a pretty marginal and unlikely case and as long as all server-side data for deleted accounts is cleared on deletion we’ll be OK allowing reuse of usernames.\nThere’s also the spam account users that have been IP banned or won’t ever be back again since they only tend to get used once or twice at most. It’s not a huge amount of data to store for no reason, but it’s going to be a lot tidier to sweep it all out.\nTo make this work out, instead of trying to come up with a universal expiry date for all accounts, I’ll be treating accounts that have been used over a longer period much more generously than accounts that were logged into once or twice over a couple of days and then never revisited. Any account with usage will be preserved for multiple years, if not forever. Accounts that have never been logged into after registration can expect to live for maybe 48 hours.\n","date":"21 January, 2017","permalink":"/2017/01/21/inactive-account-purges/","section":"News","summary":"ChinWag is coming up on two years old now, so there are a few “I’ll worry about that later” jobs that I now need to start worrying about.","title":"Inactive Account Purges"},{"content":"","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/tags/beta/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"beta"},{"content":"","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/tags/carbons/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"carbons"},{"content":"","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/tags/clients/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"clients"},{"content":"","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/tags/swift/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"swift"},{"content":"A great little chat client, Swift, has a new beta of its upcoming 4.0 release available and I’d encourage all ChinWag users to check it out if you’re looking for a reliable and uncomplicated desktop chat client.\nVersion 4 adds support for message carbons, making it easy to switch between multiple desktop or mobile chats and just picking up where you left off. Swift does not, unfortunately, have support for OTR or OMEMO encryption at this time, which I’d really love to see in the future.\nYou can download Swift here for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.\n","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/2016/08/11/swift-im-beta/","section":"News","summary":"A great little chat client, Swift, has a new beta of its upcoming 4.","title":"Swift IM Beta"},{"content":"","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/tags/outage/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"outage"},{"content":"Hi everyone, there was a service outage last night of approximately five hours, from 3am to 8am (AEST). This was due to an configuration file error that prevented a restart of Prosody after a scheduled config reload. Human idiocy, basically – the config was not tested after an edit.\nApologies to all affected, services have been returned to normal.\n","date":"11 August, 2016","permalink":"/2016/08/11/service-outage/","section":"News","summary":"Hi everyone, there was a service outage last night of approximately five hours, from 3am to 8am (AEST).","title":"Service Outage"},{"content":"","date":"12 June, 2016","permalink":"/tags/gateway/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"gateway"},{"content":"","date":"12 June, 2016","permalink":"/tags/irc/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"irc"},{"content":"On a testing basis, to see if it’s useful to anyone, I’ve enabled an IRC gateway. This allows you to use your XMPP client to connect to an IRC channel as if it were a native multi-user conference.\nYou should be able to join IRC channels on any network by joining a group chat or MUC, in the format of the following example:\n#chinwag%irc.freenode.org@irc.chinwag.im Substitute any IRC server name or channel in there as appropriate to your needs. As an alternative, and because it’s also an Australian service, I’ve enabled a second gateway directly to the oz.org IRC network. You can join any channel there with the much simpler form:\n#chinwag@ozorg.chinwag.im This brings you the option to set up a persistent connection to any IRC channel you might want via any client, mobile or desktop, like Conversations or Swift.\nIf you have questions, ask in the ChinWag lobby channel, or message mike@chinwag.im for help.\n","date":"12 June, 2016","permalink":"/2016/06/12/irc-gateway/","section":"News","summary":"On a testing basis, to see if it’s useful to anyone, I’ve enabled an IRC gateway.","title":"IRC Gateway"},{"content":"","date":"12 June, 2016","permalink":"/tags/transport/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"transport"},{"content":"","date":"9 June, 2016","permalink":"/tags/movim/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"movim"},{"content":" The Movim Chats view Since I started this little project, one of the main things I’ve been looking for is a decent web interface for chatting. I’ve tested and rejected a lot of things. Some options came really close to being what I wanted but just didn’t seem to have any momentum behind them and stagnated.\nI wanted to achieve two things when I set up ChinWag. I wanted to publish a basic guide on how to get your own public XMPP server off the ground, and I wanted to provide a good end-user experience for non-technical users to have access to that service.\nIt’s been a year, and aside from a lot of thinking in the shower, and chatting in various conferences when the subject comes up, I haven’t really touched the second part. That’s going to be my big push for the next year of ChinWag, and I’m starting with implementing Movim as the primary web chat client, and using it for account registration.\nIt has flaws right now, especially that it’s occasionally a bit flaky when trying to log in – I have been starting to flex some old programming muscles that haven’t been used for years to fix and diagnose some of this. I think it’s a great foundation for a solid user experience though, and I’ll be starting to look critically at how things go for new users especially.\nI’d be really happy if any and all ChinWag users would try Movim out and give me their impressions. I know it can be a little frustrating right now, and occasionally logs you out more often than you’d want, but I think it’s going to be great for us all, especially if we end up with good OMEMO support in it.\nMy priorities for the immediate future of ChinWag are a stable and reliable login process for the Movim client, an easy mechanism to invite your friends to sign up or add you to their roster, and a nicer signup process that includes prompting for an email address for password reset or recovery.\nWhile I do intend to run ChinWag as a complete communication solution for users and their contacts, please know that I will never implement anything that breaks federation with the larger XMPP community here. Provision of a fancy web client will never obstruct your ability to use the client software of your choice. For Android users, I cannot recommend Conversations to you highly enough. Do yourself a favour and pick it up if you haven’t already.\nEnough from me. If you want to talk about stuff like this, please message mike@chinwag.im or stop by the Lobby channel on rooms.chinwag.im and hassle me, I’m always there!\n","date":"9 June, 2016","permalink":"/2016/06/09/moving-to-movim/","section":"News","summary":"The Movim Chats view Since I started this little project, one of the main things I’ve been looking for is a decent web interface for chatting.","title":"Moving to Movim"},{"content":"","date":"9 June, 2016","permalink":"/tags/web-chat/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"web chat"},{"content":"It’s now one whole year since I opened ChinWag to the public. As a result I’ve met some great people, chatted with a bunch of you from all over the world in the Lobby channel, and learned a lot about many topics.\nI did kind of want to write a more substantial post this week, about future plans and cool projects I’ve been looking at, how to have a properly secure conversation with someone … oh so many topics and so little time.\nI’m going to settle though, for just saying thanks especially to the Prosody developers without whom there’d be no server at all. This service only exists because I’d been answering a lot of questions one particular week about how to set up Prosody, and thought I’d take a shot at doing it from scratch and documenting the process. This was the live example that I created along the way.\nI’m well overdue to post an update on the changes I’ve made since then, and I keep promising myself I’ll put a full set of config file examples on GitHub too. Nag me in the Lobby sometime about that and I might get it done.\nSo, here we go … year two begins now. Bring it on.\n","date":"13 May, 2016","permalink":"/2016/05/13/happy-birthday/","section":"News","summary":"It’s now one whole year since I opened ChinWag to the public.","title":"Happy Birthday!"},{"content":"It’s now a handful of days until Australia’s new metadata retention laws come into effect, and I just wanted to publish a quick note about how this does and does not affect your usage of ChinWag for messaging, as ChinWag is Australian-hosted and pitched primarily as a provider of services primarily to Australians.\nFirstly, the focus at ChinWag is reliable communication above all. This is not a heavily privacy-focussed server, although use of XMPP comes with some inherent advantages from requiring mandatory encryption and other privacy options for all end-users to take advantage of.\nHowever, it should be made clear that we do not do extra above-and-beyond work to ensure additional anonymity. Server logs are kept for a couple of weeks, the logs are not explicitly scrubbed of IP addresses or identifying information, backups are made and transferred offsite, and conference room chats may be logged on the server for diagnostic purposes at times. The disks that our servers use are hosted by third parties who may have the ability to access the data stored on them. Also we know we do not have an explicit privacy policy right now, but that will be addressed quite soon and will broadly say something similar to the above. None of your information is ever provided or sold to a third party.\nSo the executive summary of the above is that we don’t care what you’re doing, don’t explicitly monitor and watch you and it’s pretty good from a privacy perspective, but we’d like to be upfront that we may, from time to time, end up looking at stuff under a metaphorical microscope if there’s an issue or threat to the servers. Information that may be able to be used to identify a specific user, linking an IP to a username for example, may be stored for indeterminate periods. This is pretty normal from a systems admin perspective but it does surprise people sometimes.\nIn regards to metadata retention specifically, we believe (thanks to a good analysis by Fastmail) that we are not explicitly required to retain anything and as such we will not even attempt to do so. We’re not exactly in the same business as Fastmail of course, but we’re doing similar enough jobs at the end of the day that we’re pretty sure we’re in the same situation on this matter.\nOf course, your ISP can and probably will record that you visit chinwag.im in the first place, that you use an XMPP client and it connects to our services and a hell of a lot can be extrapolated from that. It’s not perfect, nothing is. If you have huge concerns about this situation please feel free to ask questions in the ChinWag Lobby comment on this post, message us on social media or whatever it takes and we can help with advice and solutions such as using a VPN.\n","date":"8 October, 2015","permalink":"/2015/10/08/chinwag-privacy-and-metadata/","section":"News","summary":"It’s now a handful of days until Australia’s new metadata retention laws come into effect, and I just wanted to publish a quick note about how this does and does not affect your usage of ChinWag for messaging, as ChinWag is Australian-hosted and pitched primarily as a provider of services primarily to Australians.","title":"ChinWag, Privacy and Metadata"},{"content":"","date":"8 October, 2015","permalink":"/tags/metadata/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"metadata"},{"content":"","date":"8 October, 2015","permalink":"/tags/privacy/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"privacy"},{"content":"","date":"15 May, 2015","permalink":"/tags/rooms/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"rooms"},{"content":"We’re still quite a long way from the slick, integrated experience I’ve got in mind as a long-term goal, but as of now there’s a really simple page you can go to for quick access to the Lobby and any other chat rooms you might want to create or use.\nSimply head over to https://chinwag.im/webchat/ and sign in. You’ll find yourself dropped right into the Lobby and can carry on from there. I think you’ll still have the best experience with some dedicated XMPP client software, but for times when you need a quick web-based option, we’ll keep you covered.\n","date":"15 May, 2015","permalink":"/2015/05/15/simple-chat-room-access/","section":"News","summary":"We’re still quite a long way from the slick, integrated experience I’ve got in mind as a long-term goal, but as of now there’s a really simple page you can go to for quick access to the Lobby and any other chat rooms you might want to create or use.","title":"Simple Chat Room Access"},{"content":"Log in with your full JID, username@chinwag.im and password. You’ll need to register here first if you haven’t already.\n","date":"14 May, 2015","permalink":"/webchat/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"Log in with your full JID, username@chinwag.","title":"Web Chat"},{"content":"With a huge list of possible client software, it’s hard to give complete setup instructions for everything. We’ll go into detail on some of the more popular options but if you’re somewhat familiar with XMPP in general or know your way around your software, here are the basic answers to some questions you’ll see often.\nAccount Type: some software supports many types of messaging services. If asked for the type, choose “XMPP” or “Jabber”.**\nUsername:** you chose this when you registered. Usually short and simple.\nDomain: this is common to all accounts at a service provider. For ChinWag accounts, this will always be “chinwag.im”.\nJID: some software may refer to a “JID” instead of a username. This is the combination of your username and the service domain name. A JID looks like “admin@chinwag.im“.\nPassword: also chosen by you at account creation. If you’ve forgotten your password you’ll need to contact us.\nRecommended Software All the software on this list has been tested and known to work with ChinWag at a basic level for text messaging. Support for additional features such as voice, video calling and file transfers may vary between clients, and we encourage reports of odd behaviour and incompatibilities to us.\nWindows Swift – good, simple, uncomplicated client. Pidgin – supports many different chat protocols besides XMPP Mac OS X Swift – good, simple, uncomplicated client. Adium – a good multiple-protocol application, similar in many ways to Pidgin Linux Swift – good, simple, uncomplicated client. Pidgin – available also on Windows, a good all-around choice Android Conversations – modern interface, simple setup, handles multiple accounts Xabber – free, also allows multiple accounts, runs well on older devices Yaxim – free, good support for security features iOS Monal – voice call support, privacy focussed, great design ","date":"13 May, 2015","permalink":"/setup/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"With a huge list of possible client software, it’s hard to give complete setup instructions for everything.","title":"Setup"},{"content":"Well, it’s been a fairly long process due to this being not much more than a side project, but ChinWag is a fully functional XMPP service right now. There’s more to come, especially on the web site front-end, but for now I’m considering the site launched, and bless all those who sail in her.\nI’ve set up ChinWag with the intent of providing the best possible end-user experience for XMPP. Right now my priority is documentation pages, outlining how to set up several popular clients. Also important is a good directory of what clients exist and their relative feature sets.\nWe have Jappix available right now as a convenient web client. That will stay, but I’m also looking at a bunch of other options, but some of that will take time and a little hacking on code here and there. I won’t be getting too technical on this site, keeping the focus mainly on what’s relevant to users. Please follow me over at my personal site if you want to get down into the nuts and bolts of what’s going on.\nPlease let me know if there’s anything I can do at the server side to make things work better for you.\n","date":"13 May, 2015","permalink":"/2015/05/13/welcome-to-chinwag/","section":"News","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWell, it’s been a fairly long process due to this being not much more than \u003ca href=\"http://bremensaki.com/chinwag/\"   target=\"_blank\"\u003ea side project\u003c/a\u003e, but ChinWag is a fully functional XMPP service right now. There’s more to come, especially on the web site front-end, but for now I’m considering the site launched, and bless all those who sail in her.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Welcome to ChinWag"},{"content":"Not sure what’s going on? Things are still ramping up here, so there will be glitches from time to time which I’ll make every attempt to cover on the site news blog.\nIf you’re having issues with the chat services, you have a few options.\nPhoto by Anthony Albright If you can log in via the web client, join the “lobby” chat room and ask questions there. You can make a comment on this post, and we’ll see it. We have a Facebook page, you can message us or comment there. Support will become more elaborate as we grow and build up a FAQ and other documentation.\n","date":"13 May, 2015","permalink":"/support/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"Not sure what’s going on?","title":"Support"},{"content":"If you don’t already have a chinwag.im XMPP account, you can create one right here.\nOnce your account is created, you can log in and start talking via the web client, or by using one of many mobile or desktop computer applications.\n","date":"12 May, 2015","permalink":"/register/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"If you don’t already have a chinwag.","title":"Register"},{"content":" Consider Chinwag to be your friendly, local pub. Make yourself at home, bring your friends, have a good time! Meet new people, have a laugh, enjoy the ambience, and the Oxford commas. Log In or Register Ready for a Chinwag? We have many tools to help you chat with your friends! One day we\u0026rsquo;ll tell you about them here!\nWhat is all this? I guess this would be a great place to explain stuff!\n","date":"11 May, 2015","permalink":"/","section":"Welcome to Chinwag!","summary":"Consider Chinwag to be your friendly, local pub.","title":"Welcome to Chinwag!"}]