Quack,
We wish you a better year (a bit late, sorry). Many hugs to you.
=== Toushirou's Move ===
We need to move Toushirou since Nerim is closing the room where it is currently housed. Pilou is kindly handling the physical part of it since I cannot do that remotly from Japan. We'll send more detailed info about the disturbance and timing.
=== IRC Upgrade ===
We recently upgraded our IRC servers. This version of the software reached end of upstream support and that will make switching to the soon to come new Debian release easier anyway. The documentation was updated accordingly: https://users.duckcorp.org/index.php/Services/IRC
Highlights: - problems with older IRC clients (https://docs.inspircd.org/faq/#why-does-my-client-not-show-mode-changesopped...); on Thorfinn IRSSI was fine but weechat was upgraded to a backport (I tried using the /upgrade command but it crashed so avoiding a restart is probably not possible) - SASL/EXTERNAL method is now available, practical with certfp (recommended) to get security and autologin (TLS required); read the doc on the wiki for more info - STS is supported to suggest IRC clients to switch to TLS
=== IRC Policy Changes
To increase security, privacy and ease fighting disturbing people that do not forget to visit us every year we are changing some requirements.
MilkyPond will become a TLS-only network starting early March. Nowadays IRC clients on all OSes/devices all support TLS and it's just one single checkbox to check so it should not be difficult for non technical people to switch. The available port list will not change, only insecure connections won't work anymore.
Registering an account is not compulsory but recommended too; channel owners might require it though. Using certfp and SASL/EXTERNAL it is very easy to automagically login to your account while connecting. It's the same recommendation you can find on freenode and other major networks and it's not very difficult to setup (see on the wiki).
#DuckCorp is our admin channels. We ought to always be able to discuss peacefully even when the IRC network is being spammed, so we are going to require an account to join this channel at the same date we make TLS compulsory. This does not affect other channels.
=== The world of Matrix ===
We wanted to experiment running a Matrix server to provide an alternative method of communication. We still use IRC but not everyone find it practical, XMPP is available too but lost traction, several of us use Signal but even if the clients are opensource the server is not and it's totally centralized, so we're now providing a new method for those who wish to try. It works fine so far but some features are still missing.
The wiki is not yet updated but if you wish to try you can connect with your LDAP uid/password on the "milkypond.org" domain (no need to register with us, your Matrix account is created at first login) with: - the MilkyPond Web UI: https://matrixonweb.milkypond.org/ - Quaternion on a GNU/Linux desktop - Element on Android (available on F-Droid) (other clients exist but they were not tested)
We also experimented with a bridge to join communication between the #MilkyPond and #DuckCorp IRC channels and their Matrix counterpart, sorry for the noise, but that did not work well because of several limitations and the fact end-to-end encryption was enabled on Matrix thus preventing the discussions to flow towards IRC which does not support such encryption. The goal was to prevent splitting the community but maybe that's not such a good idea. Ideas welcome.
If you lack a service that would make this time less painful, please tell us. Be safe. _o<