The latest updates for drg.li vcs
2022/02/14 about that...
Hi, there. You may have already noticed that things have started looking a little different around here recently. Truthfully, I have been working on the website for the last couple weeks on and off, so we have some exciting things to share. Firstly, the site's backend has been updated to the latest version, introducing new security, API, and authentication features, as well as a whole whack ton of enhancements and bugfixes. Secondly, you've no doubt already noticed that the site's navigation has been completely overhauled. Most Gitea instances have the same "GitHub-adjacent" navigation style. It's unquestionably functional and familliar for GitHub users, but we decided to move some stuff around to spice things up. Site navigation and settings have been moved to the new "drg.li vcs" menu in the upper left. After logging in, all your personal data is at your fingertips through the "[your] stuff" menu. You can also click on your avatar in the upper right to view your profile, or click the button to the right of it to log out. We would love some feedback on our new navigation, if you'd like to give us some constructive criticism, go to the site's issue tracker and leave a comment or create a new issue. Finally, theme diversity is returning to drg.li vcs. In June's update, our old themes broke, so we switched to a new default theme to improve visual cohesion with other drg.li services. The slick dark theme with red accents will remain as the default, but signed-in users will find a new "Appearance" panel in their settings. Here they can select between three different unique dark themes (including the default one and Gitea's inbuilt arc-green), the default light theme (gitea), or switch to one of the "auto*" options to allow the site to synchronize with your computer's dark/light theme settings (requires compatible browser).
Finally, before we wrap things up we probably need to mention the elephant in the room. In the last update, we promised there would be another update (and a user database purge) before the beginning of this year. Unfortunately, unforseen circumstances caused those plans to get delayed indefinitely. Obviously we just did an update, but we're going to continue putting off the account database purge for now. Over the next few days I will continue monitoring the site and making small tweaks as needed, and we'll worry about purging the account database later.
Recap time: The site has been updated with new features, a slick new navigation layout, and better theme integration. Our account database purge has been postponed, but you can expect all accounts with no repositories and not logged in after December 31, 2020 to be deleted before the end of March. We are going to continue tweaking some stuff over the next few days, please let us know if you encounter any problems by dropping into the site's issue tracker!
2021/11/17 updates and fixes
Hello! Today I did some much needed maintenance on the vcs.drg.li system. This will be the second to last update for the service this year. The major highlight of this particular update is email improvements. This service has been partially dependent upon email since it's inception, but it has never actually had reliable deliverability. vcs.drg.li had been using the long deprecated drg.li mailing service to handle everything. This worked OK for a while, but it had deliverability issues, and that service no longer exists. We have completely overhauled the email backend and now things should be working a little better. If you've been having trouble creating an account recently because of activation emails, or you've been locked out because you can't reset your password, please try again now. The new email address for all transactional account emails is vcs-noreply(at)sib.drg.li. The new mailer does not currently support email notifications.
Aside from email improvements, we have also patched up the host system and upgraded mikuru!git to the latest upstream Gitea version. We have also cleaned all unactivated accounts. If you've been having trouble activating a new account recently due to email issues, please re-create your account and try again. We have also made the decision to disable Git LFS for this instance. Git LFS has not historically been used by any projects hosted on this instance, so we've decided to cut support for it to preserve system resources.
Before we wrap up this update, we'd like to announce that the next update will occur in December. It will include the manual user database purge discussed in September's update, as well as an operating system upgrade for the vcs.drg.li server. We would also like to take that opportunity to plan for and discuss the future of this instance and our vcs services.
2021/09/01 account database cleaned
As promised in the last update, the account database has been cleaned. In addition to the usual unannounced purge of all accounts that have not been email-activated, we have also deleted all accounts which have no repositories, and have not been logged in since August of 2020. Additionally, all accounts which have no repositories, were created prior to December of 2020, and have not been logged in since the day they were created have also been deleted.
Additionally, we have introduced some account restriction features to help us deal with suspicious activity. Accounts may be locked or restricted at any time without warning to prevent abusive usage of the site's features. For now, accounts can only be locked or restricted by an administrator's manual review if the account's recent or overall activities are suspicious, spammy, or abusive. Information about these restrictions and contacting the administrators to get them lifted is available here.
We will be performing another manual user database purge before the end of 2021. During this purge, all accounts which have no repositories and have not logged in after December 31, 2020 will be deleted. The next purge will not affect any accounts created in 2021.
2021/06/23 theme and gitea updated
Over the last couple days, we have been working on various minor improvements to the vcs.drg.li service. For starters, we've upgraded mikuru!git to the latest upstream Gitea codebase. We have also added a new default theme to the site to beter fit with the theming of other drg.li services. The upstream rebase caused our old themes to break, and we have not yet updated them to be fully compatible. If you're experiencing white backgrounds, illegible text, or other graphical issues with the website, please go to your account settings and select one of the three currently available themes.
While I'm making a little post here, I'd also like to announce that the next account database purge will occur sometime in August. All accounts that were created before December 2020, have no repositories, and which have not been logged into since August of 2020 will be deleted, even if they've been email activated. We still perform periodical and unannounced database purges of all accounts that have not been email-activated.
2021/01/09 account database purge
We have formed a habit of periodically purging all accounts that have not been email activated. Today's purge was a little different. We have recently noticed a sharp rise in registrations so from here on out we will occasionally also do manual user database purges. In today's purge, all accounts that haven't been logged into since the day they were created and which were created before June 2020 have been removed. This purge did not affect any accounts that have repo or organization data.
2021/01/09 drg.li vcs wiki created
This announcement marks the creation of this wiki! We will put some useful documentation and post updates about the service here. This repository also contains the issue tracker for the site. I also recently updated the site to the latest gitea backend which added some interesting new features.
2020 shutdown announcement
Prior to this wiki's creation we used the homepage to announce that we'd shutdown the service before changing our mind and opting to keep the service open. You can find an archive of those announcements here.