Hello users!

I haven’t made a post in a while, so I figured I’d make one about what’s going on with XMPP.is. First of all, Happy New Year! 2018 has been a great year for the server and I’ve received $135 USD in donations via PayPal. Thank you to all the donors, you are what helps keep this server running. Thank you to the few who donated cryptocurrency as well! Since there hasn’t been many posts, here are some things I’ve accomplished last year…

• I made numerous improvements to the server’s configuration, adding support for many new XEPs and becoming 100% compliant according to this compliance tester. I’ve made several improvements to the server’s scripts and even added a few. You can see every change I’ve made on GitHub. Open source is the best 🙂
• I’ve updated a lot of pages on the site, adding more info and descriptions.
• I’ve tried to keep downtime to a bare-minimum. With the new hypervisor things have been more stable than ever. I’ve also improved on scheduling maintenance windows and giving notice beforehand.

Now onto 2019…

Recently I’ve been working on cleaning up registered users. We currently have over 37,000 registered users. Many years ago before I had web registrations and captchas in place, a nefarious individual/group registered over 35,000 accounts en-masse. A lot of the accounts follow a pattern (which I won’t disclose). I am working on cleaning up these users and deleting them, as they’ve never been used (as far as I know). This is a long and drawn out process as I have to make sure the accounts I’m deleting are not legitimate.

I’ve made a couple one-liner scripts in bash to find these accounts based on the pattern in their usernames that I’ve noticed. While it work 95% of the time, it also picks up legitimate users and I have to manually filter them out from the deletion lists. I’ve been going through the lists when I make them and taking out any users that look legitimate. As this is a manual process I might miss a few here and there… If your account gets deleted and you notice you can no longer login, please let me know. I can restore it from encrypted, off-site backups. Keep in mind that these usernames are very uncommon. They are probably taken from a word list and random numbers are added to them.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

~ Lunar