Igloo Cafe BBS

geckof

Sysoperator

From: Antarctica

Registered: September 18, 2020

Website

Igloo Cafe turns 4! (+ new updates)

On a day on September 18, 2020, the first VPS of the Igloo Cafe "retro-Internet community project" would be started for the first time, on a pretty small Contabo VPS. From being a place where personal homepages were offered for a small group of friends, it has become something more than just that. In fact, I started it after seeing interest in what the Tildeverse was all about, wanting to have my own space on Gopher, "alternative" tilde-like communities like Park-City.club (which I don't know if that's still alive anymore) and those free shell account providers like SDF.

Today, in these 4 years of this project, I would like to thank all those who played and enjoyed our Igloo Arena gameservers and helped our projects and services with ideas and other resources.

Unfortunately I haven't had enough motivation or time to finish with most of the things I've been doing to announce it in a different post, but taking advantage of these anniversary days, I'll leave all the changes and new things I've been doing here:

• The new Igloo Cafe Gallery! (resurrection of something I had done around 2021, inspired by the SDF's photo gallery).

• The Igloo Cafe Help Pages, which replaces our old wiki which I opted to close due to complications. It's running with Ubergeek's/Thunix's Wiki.php (as the original wiki used to run in early 2023 before PmWiki) but with some improvements and with a minimalistic design.

• A recent move from our main VPS to DataWagon, with 4vCPU and 8GB of RAM! And yes, we're back in NY.

• Finger! Yeah, that's right, that old and forgotten protocol to get information about an user on a UNIX-like server. It's running with IcculusFinger and all existing Igloo Cafe members will be able to post content on it by editing the ".plan" file in a new directory called "public_finger". To see your current Finger status, do in your terminal "finger yourusername@igl01.igloocafe.xyz" or you can also use our IcculusFinger web interface at "http(s)://finger.igloocafe.xyz/?user=yourusername". Installing this was very complicated but finally it was possible with a bit of patience.

• The igloos have been moved to my new Raspberry Pi 3B+ that I bought at the beginning of August (to avoid problems).

• User igloos avatars are now loaded and processed from a Bash script running every 1 hour with the help of a cronjob, which avoids the loads by preprocessing the images directly from PHP.

• And other things I no longer remember now...

Thanks for everything and happy anniversary!!!

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