Service Updates

Decommissioning Jabber/XMPP

The XMPP (jabber) server is in a rather sorry state. It has not been operational since an upgrade at the end of last year broke it. The database needs to be upgraded to a new format, and neither the Debian package maintainers nor the upstream ejabberd project provide such a facility. I had always intended to manually migrate the data, but this now seems unlikely, give the constraints on my time.

To that end, I plan to retire the waxworlds XMPP (Jabber) services on 12th June 2018.

We also now host a matrix server for chat. Matrix (and riot) have proved to be a very successful alternative to jabber that also works well on mobile platforms, handles multiple connections better, facilitates posting images/files/links and is generally much more modern in its approach to chat. Essentially, I would propose that he Jabber service is also now redundant and my recommendation, going forwards, would be to use matrix anyway.

If there are any significant reasons why you think I shouldn't EOL the jabber service, or why you think I should attempt to manually migrate the data and revive it, please get in touch before 12th June.