August 2022 - Recent Updates

[fearedbliss]

Hey all,

I hope that you and your families are all doing well and that everyone is having fun during these chaotic times. I wanted to sync up with everyone since it's been a few months. Primarily just updating people on work that I've been working on to improve the forum, primarily internal improvements.

The first is that both the forum (both its website and database components) are both running within separate FreeBSD Jails. You can essentially consider a jail as a lightweight virtual machine. This massively increases the security of the forum and its data. It also increases the stability of the forum as well, since server upgrades are more isolated, and a server upgrade that could potentially break a forum dependency, will be further isolated and contained.

Second, Google recently did a change (a few months ago around May 2022) which broke the forum's emailing capabilities. With this broken, it wouldn't have been possible for new users to register, since I use that as part of my anti-spam mechanism through email verification. I've since fixed this issue so forum registration and all forum email functionality should be working again.

Lastly, I previously had "The Cactus Sanctuary" Odysee and Youtube channels for videos, and "The Moving Caravan at gmail" as the email for the forum. I've started the process of centralizing all the videos into the new "The Moving Caravan" channel (which is part the gmail account with the same name). This reduces the number of places / names that people have to remember, and enhances The Moving Caravan "brand" if you want to call it that lol. Over the next few days, I'll finish re-uploading all of the videos that "The Cactus Sanctuary" had to the new youtube channel. Once that's complete, the Odysee channel will be removed. The Cactus Sanctuary YT has already been deleted.

Stay safe everyone, Sanctuary needs you!

- Jonathan