Prosodical Thoughts

Simple Anti-Spam Tips

You can take it as a sign of success of a network when it becomes worthwhile for spammers to set up camp. If you’re an active user of XMPP, there is a chance you’ve been unfortunate enough to receive spam in recent weeks. Spam has always been an occasional issue on the network, as with any network, website or internet service. However a few years ago spammers really started to take things more seriously on XMPP.

Great Invitations

There are two kinds of servers on the XMPP network today: those with public registration, and those without. The servers that support registration generally allow you to create accounts via the web, or using your XMPP client (XEP-0077). The problem is that this opens your server up to the world. Even when you add CAPTCHAs and other defences, even the most careful XMPP public server admin will at some point see spammers registering accounts on their server.

Prosody 0.11.6 released

We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch. This release brings a collection of fixes and improvements added since the 0.11.5 release improving security, performance, usability and interoperability. This version continues the deprecation of using prosodyctl to start/stop Prosody if it is installed system-wide. You should use your init system’s appropriate commands to manage the Prosody process instead. You can silence the warnings with the ‘prosodyctl_service_warnings’ option.

Prosody 0.11.5 released

We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch. This release mostly adds command line flags to force foreground or background operation, which replaces and deprecates the ‘daemonize’ option in the config file. A summary of changes in this release: Fixes and improvements prosody / mod_posix: Support for command-line flags to override ‘daemonize’ config option Minor changes mod_websocket: Clear mask bit when reflecting ping frames (fixes #1484: Websocket masks pong answer) Download As usual, download instructions for many platforms can be found on our download page

Introducing Snikket

Reviewing the past decade A little over 11 years ago, a group of us started the project that would snowball to become Prosody. There were a number of reasons for embarking on this new project, but one of our primary objectives was to make running your own server much easier than it was back then in 2008. Looking back, I think we’ve made significant progress. Not only in Prosody, but across the XMPP ecosystem there has been a renewed focus on improving the user experience of projects.

Prosody 0.11.4 released

We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch. This release contains a number of bug fixes and a couple of performance improvements. A summary of changes in this release: Fixes and improvements core.rostermanager: Improve performance by caching rosters of offline #1233 mod_pep: Handling subscriptions more efficiently #1372 Minor changes util.interpolation: Support unescaped variables with more modifiers #1452 MUC: Mark source of historic messages correctly #1416 mod_auth_internal_hashed: Pass on errors #1477 mod_mam, mod_muc_mam: Improve logging of failures #1478, #1480, #1481 mod_muc, mod_muc_mam: Reschedule message expiry in case of failure mod_mam: Add flag to session when it performs a MAM query prosodyctl check: Warn about conflict between mod_pep and mod_pep_simple prosodyctl check: Warn about conflict between mod_vcard and mod_vcard_legacy #1469 core.

Prosody 0.11.3 released

We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch. This is a bugfix release for the stable 0.11 branch. It is recommended for all users of 0.11.x to upgrade. Important note for those upgrading: Previous releases did not automatically expire messages from group chat (MUC) archives, so if mod_muc_mam was loaded and enabled for a MUC, archives would grow indefinitely. This is not what most deployments want, therefore automatic expiry is now implemented and enabled with a default 7 day retention.

Survey reminder and FOSDEM

This is a reminder that the 2019 community survey is still open, as announced earlier. We are always discovering new people and projects using Prosody that we were unaware of. We do not have any kind of tracking in Prosody, and it is impossible for us to know how many deployments there are worldwide. It is therefore easy for us to miss out on feedback from users who are not actively engaged in the project, but whose feedback is just as valuable to us.

Prosody 0.11.2 released

We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.

This is a minor bugfix release. It fixes a handful of small but important issues.

Welcoming 2019

Happy New Year!

It is my firm belief that it is the community, and not the code, that makes an open-source project what it is. With that in mind, I’d like to thank you, the community around Prosody for making the project what it is. Whether you contribute code, help test nightly builds, develop packages, support others in our chatroom and mailing lists, or simply report bugs so that we can fix them - you have helped shape the project, and helped make the project better for everyone. For that - thank you!

As well as reflecting on what we have to be grateful for, there is no better time than the start of a new year to look at the past and what we have achieved, the present, and of course look forward to the future. First, let’s start with our achievements over the past 12 months.