Jabber News

There are a lot of Jabber/XMPP email discussion lists (even more than we usually talk about on the site here, and that doesn't count specific lists for various open-source projects!). Now all the jabber.org lists are easily searchable at jabber.markmail.org, a service of the good folks at markmail.org. Just another tool to make your life a little better. :)

Have you ever wondered if you can send SMS messages to people from your Jabber client? In fact, two popular services enable you to do just that: MessagingBay and ASPSMS. All you need to do is add a special address to your Jabber contact list and then send SMS to people you know. Follow the links above for more details!

Finally we can report that the jabber.org IM service has been successfully migrated to a new machine! More details are here.

A new website has started just for discussion about Jabber/XMPP technologies: JabberForum.org. If you prefer web forums to chatrooms and email discussion lists, JabberForum.org is for you! We have turned off the forums at www.jabber.org, so please use JabberForum.org instead from now on. Thanks!

To reduce confusion, we have closed account registration at the jabber.org website. Many people thought that website registration also created an account at the jabber.org IM service, which is not true. We may enable website registration again, but only after we connect the two account databases. If you need a website account (e.g., to comment on stories or add software listings), please ask one of the website admins, who will be happy to help you.

As you might have guessed, the machine (athena) on which the jabber.org IM service runs is having hardware issues. In fact it is currently being held together with duct tape and string. :) Thankfully, HP has donated a powerful new machine (hermes) for this service. Now we just need to get hermes up and running, install the Debian operating system and the ejabberd IM software, move the jabber.org account data over, and update DNS pointers. That will happen over the next 24 to 48 hours. There may be some outages between now and then. We are not happy about the recent problems and are working hard to stabilize the jabber.org IM service as soon as possible.

We are currently experiencing hardware problems at the jabber.org IM service, so it is offline. We are preparing a new machine but we are not yet sure when it will be ready. We will report back as soon as possible regarding the server status. We are extremely sorry about the repeated outages.

We attempted to restart the jabber.org IM service this evening after installing some patches, but the service is not restarting. It should be restarted in a few hours.

We regret to announce that for certain reasons we have had to temporarily disable registration of new user accounts on the jabber.org IM service.

Existing users will still be able use the server as normal, barring changing passwords and removing their account. (If you are an existing user and need assistance feel free to join our chat room at jabber@conference.jabber.org).

This measure is only temporary, and we hope to restore full service as soon as possible.

Remember that this does not stop you creating a Jabber IM account, simply see our list of other public Jabber servers available.

We experienced an outage of our IM server today. Analysis reveals that the cause was corrupt data in the "private data storage" module, which is used to store information such as client preferences and chatroom bookmarks. We are working to restore this private data, but until we do certain information may not be available to your Jabber client. Our apologies for the outage.