Tag: Communications infrastructure

Website and forums: Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger.

We are happy to announce that we have recently deployed our new forums, running Discourse! The provide a modern, pleasant-to-use dedicated discussion tool. We have tested them out with early adopters over the past few weeks, and they are a real joy to use. You can now participate too, at forums.puri.sm.

What’s special about Discourse? Besides the official list of features, you may want to read this seminal blog post where Jeff Atwood highlights the kind of thinking that went into its functional (and aesthetic) design, making it quite different compared to traditional forum software.

Our migration to a self-hosted Discourse instance brings many benefits:

  • Improving security by isolating the forums from the rest of our infrastructure;
  • Much better usability and user experience. The previous forums were cumbersome and frustrating to use, littered with bugs and limitations, and they just looked awful visually. The new ones are much more readable, and full of modern community-enhancing features. Using a forum should be fun, not boring or cumbersome, and I know that Discourse’s design actively encourages a sense of community and self-moderation, so I’m looking forward to seeing the results over time. We hope you’ll love the new discussion tools!
  • More flexible community management tools;
  • Better email notifications, and less noise (Discourse will not spam you with mail notifications if you’ve been recently active on the forums website);
  • Simplifying our main website’s daily management (previously, the forums actually interfered with the rest of the administration UI);
  • Better performance and resources usage.

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Purism Devlog #2

Lets start this devlog with some good news, that we believe will make a lot of users happy and that it  will satisfy a few trolls as well. We moved away from Cloudflare. It was creating problems for Tor browser users (which was kind of ironic as we shipped with Tor browser on our machines as default) and the temporary solution was to whitelist all Tor nodes. We are  now finally Cloudflare free. Also our certificates are now from famous and all-loving LetsEncrypt, on all our servers.

With huge efforts to create PureOS infra, we also decided that now is the time for an entire transition. That is why we are moving all our services to a secure facility where we run our own dedicated servers. Fun times! Let us know if we broke  something during our transition! This is all brought to you by ever growing Purism team.

As we are approaching a day when PureOS infrastructure will soon be set up (hopefully in next 2 weeks), we also issue a call for volunteers. There will be wiki (which we need to populate with documentation, tutorials, ideas and magic), PureOS website (anyone eager to try their design and web coding skills?), bugtracker (oh yes, we all need that), code hosting (what would be an Free OS without Freedom code hosting service? 🙂 ) and many more goodies. Also, we issue call for ideas – if you have an idea on  how to improve any of above mentioned things please feel free to share. We want to find out what our users need and we will try to implement that with security and privacy in mind . Our vision and mission is to integrate Freedom, privacy and security. Lets talk how to improve Free software/hardware and society! IRC (#purism on freenode) and feedback@puri.sm are your friends for that.

What would be a devlog without bad news? I don’t have an answer for this but here are the bad news. While regular PureOS 2.1 image installs fine on all hardware (yes, even the NVMe SSDs) the OEM ISO fails. We are investigating this and hopefully we will resolve it this week, stay tuned. I am also very  pleased  regarding bugtracker – while we support people discussing in forums, it is a bit of an overload for our stuff to forward  complaints to us and then we through our support contact them back via forums (or in some cases mails) we must find a way to improve this. After all we are an open community and we must offer transparency in our bug reports, easy searchable by community and our stuff.

What is going on with Purist Services – well, we are issuing a volunteer call for people interested to work and chat with Joey Hess (our lead architect on this). Skills: knowledge about XMPP, OMEMO, IM, voice/audio calls (people that work and use Ring are of high interest to us. At least to our technical lead 😉 ), encrypted mails, UI/UX design (we need somehow to level up GPG usage and without really easy UI we are doomed to fail).

The last but not least – regarding all infrastructure build up, old PureOS infra will be the last to shut down. This means that you will  still have some issues with our archive. although we take all your reports seriously and fix them ASAP and we we are also preparing PureOS 2.2 release with it.

P.S. sneak peak for PureOS 3.0 which will get released with new infra – its codename will be Prometheus! That’s enough juicy details for now!!

Purism Adds Support Forum to its Website

We have added a support forum to our website. This community support forum, that is also backed by Purism staff, is just in its infancy stages, and we plan to expand upon the tools available this as usage grows.

The forum has two categories right now, one for Librem hardware, and a second one for PureOS and software.

As more and more Librem laptops are making it into the wild, we wanted a place where users could ask questions and have those questions (and hopefully answers) searchable by other users.