Ladies and gentlemen, your attention for a moment please:
As you've perhaps noticed from the real-time log articles, my company has been hosting an IRC channel, #jwrd on Freenode. I set the "topic" message as:
Public chat for clients, prospects, partners, suppliers and friends of JWRD Computing
By this, I meant that it would be kept publicly readable and available for reference, while participation was implicitly limited though as yet relatively open. Beyond that, its purpose and structure remained somewhat unclear and to be determined. While it naturally inherited certain technical and cultural aspects from the late TMSR, its scope is expected to remain much more limited.
As you've surely noticed if you've been active on Freenode lately, that network recently went through an unfriendly change of ownership and one or possibly several internal forks; the latest is that all the old servers have been shut down, leaving it entirely unusable. This isn't exactly unexpected or even interesting, as signs of unbridled stupidity have been evident in their operations and communications for quite some time. Nonetheless we were stuck there for lack of sufficient urgency to develop an alternative,(i) and this drama comes at a most inconvenient time for us.
As such, #jwrd is shuttered effective immediately, and any IRC network purporting to have such a channel does not represent us.
Those who were using it are invited to continue conversations in the comments thread here, until such time as we can do the research and prep needed to get real-time comms back online properly, at which point we will announce the change on Fixpoint.
- We have run a private IRC server for years, but it's not secured so as to be ready for wider usage, e.g. no account or channel registration. [^]
If you submitted a comment within the past day or so and it was either held for moderation or was published and now disappeared, I've deleted it by mistake; my apologies and please resubmit or at least let me know.
I'm not even certain this happened; I thought I saw a disappearing-comment animation on my dashboard after an errant click in the vicinity of the moderation buttons which pop up on mouse-over, but I haven't been able to confirm either way from the server logs and asking around. Possibly I just imagined the whole thing, in tiredness.
Comment by Jacob Welsh — 2021-06-29 @ 03:08
The channel has been back to life for some time now, using said private server - whose ircd boasts an uptime since 14 Feb 2018, not bad! - but remains open by invitation only until I get the software & hosting situation shored up.
Comment by Jacob Welsh — 2021-07-06 @ 20:16
[...] the state of the world altogether) which saw the program lose at least one useful user, the end of Freenode, minimal progress on vetting server software for self-hosting, and the continued decline in [...]
Pingback by yrc 95K release with patch pile « Fixpoint — 2023-01-24 @ 20:59
[...] This story, or at least this chapter of the longer story, is finally getting a happy ending. [...]
Pingback by Grand reopening of #jwrd, the IRC channel « Fixpoint — 2023-05-13 @ 00:31