etke.ccNews
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Stable Updates Published
- Baibot : latest -> v1.1.1
- Element : v1.11.77 -> v1.11.78
- Etherpad : 2.2.2 -> 2.2.5
- Synapse Admin : v0.10.3-etke14 -> v0.10.3-etke17
Service Updates: Customer Support changes
We wanted to inform you about important changes in how we handle support. Over the years, we’ve been accessible through various channels—Email, Matrix, Telegram, Fediverse—but technical challenges (SSL certificate issues, encryption troubles with Matrix bots, missing notifications, etc.) have complicated things for both you and us.
To improve this, we’re consolidating all support into a single system using FreeScout (a great open-source helpdesk). While we’ll be retiring the old contact methods, rest assured that these existing methods will continue to work for now. However, we encourage you to start using the new options for a more streamlined experience.
From now on, here’s how you can contact us:
- Email us directly using our new email address (all emails go directly into FreeScout).
- Click the
Contact supportbutton in your Synapse-Admin (details below).- Submit a support request using the form on our contacts page .
- Use the Support Portal to manage your support requests.
All these methods lead to the same support queue in FreeScout, ensuring consistent and timely responses regardless of the interface you choose to use. This new setup allows us to better track and respond to your requests more efficiently.
Additionally, after the next maintenance run , you’ll notice a new
Contact supportbutton in Synapse-Admin , which will take you directly to the support portal.Service Updates: Synapse-Admin Safeguards
A while ago, we announced our Synapse-Admin fork to provide more features and quality-of-life improvements for our customers.
We’ve already implemented an extensive list of changes , and starting this week, a new safeguard has been introduced: system-managed users (like bots, bridge puppets, etc.) will have restricted modification capabilities in Synapse-Admin. Altering these users has historically led to serious problems—sometimes even requiring full server reinstallation. To prevent this, we’ve now disabled dangerous actions (e.g., password changes, account locking, deactivation, erasure) by default, while allowing safer changes (like updating display names and avatars).
Please note that the list of system-managed users will vary by server. You can review your server’s list by checking the configuration at
https://matrix.your-server.com/synapse-admin/config.json(you may need to reload the page to refresh the cache).
Stable Updates Published
- Cinny : v4.2.0 -> v4.2.1
- Gmessages : v0.4.3 -> v0.5.0
- Meta Instagram : v0.3.2 -> v0.4.0
- Meta Messenger : v0.3.2 -> v0.4.0
- Peertube : v6.2.1 -> v6.3.0
- Radicale : 3.2.3.0 -> 3.2.3.1
- Signal : v0.7.0 -> v0.7.1
- Slack : v0.1.0 -> v0.1.1
- Synapse : v1.114.0 -> v1.115.0
- Synapse Admin : v0.10.3-etke12 -> v0.10.3-etke14
- Synapse S3 Storage Provider : 1.3.0 -> 1.5.0
- Traefik : v3.1.2 -> v3.1.3
Stable Updates Published
- Baibot : latest new
- Cinny : v4.1.0 -> v4.2.0
- Element : v1.11.76 -> v1.11.77
- Honoroit : v0.9.25 -> v0.9.26
- Synapse Admin : v0.10.3-etke12
Service Update: New Component - Baibot
At etke.cc , we haven’t been entirely happy with the state of AI / LLM integration into Matrix.
We’ve been offering the matrix-chatgpt-bot service to our customers, but we’ve found it rather limited because:
- it’s complicated to install, requiring manual intervention
- it doesn’t allow self-servicing (changing the configuration at runtime), which increases our support burden
- it only supports a single provider (OpenAI) and model, hardcoded in the configuration
- it only supports text-generation
- it stores all its state (including messages exchanged in encrypted rooms) in a plaintext file
This provoked us to develop a more private and much more 🌟 featureful alternative - baibot . 🤖 As with everything we do, it’s released under the AGPLv3 license.
Existing etke.cc customers can request the new baibot service by contacting us , while new customers can order it directly from our order form .
To learn more about the project and how to install the software against your own Matrix server, see the baibot project on Github .
Service Update: ChatGPT bot is Deprecated
The ChatGPT bot hasn’t been receiving fixes and new features for a long time, so we decided to deprecate it and offer Baibot as a replacement.
Service Update: Synapse-Admin Fork
Since day one, we’ve been offering Synapse-Admin as a core service. Over time, we identified several areas where small tweaks and enhancements could improve the user experience.
Little by little, we’be been making improvements or adopting and reworking existing upstream PRs, which have been stuck in review for long. We’re hoping that all our changes will eventually be accepted upstream and will make our fork obsolete.
For now, it seems like the original project has lost momentum, so we’ll continue maintaining our own fork, for the benefit of our customers
Here’s a list of the changes already implemented (full details here ):
- Prevent admins from deleting themselves
- Fix user’s default tab not being shown
- Add identifier when authorizing with password
- Add ability to toggle whether to show locked users
- Fix user’s display name in header on user’s page
- Fix footer overlapping content
- Switch from nginx to SWS for serving the app, reducing the size of the Docker image
- Fix redirect URL after user creation
- Display actual Synapse errors
- Fix base_url being undefined on unsuccessful login
- Put the version into manifest.json (CI only)
- Federation page improvements (using theme colors)
More updates are in the pipeline (check them here ). A big thank you to the authors and contributors of the upstream project for providing such an outstanding tool!
Service Update: admin.etke.cc Goes Live
Our Synapse-Admin fork is now the default on all servers, updated with regular maintenance runs. However, if you’d like to check out the latest improvements before they’re installed on your server, we’ve launched admin.etke.cc . This CDN-hosted version always features the latest commit from the fork repo .
Stable Updates Published
- Buscarron : v1.4.2 -> v1.4.3
- Element : v1.11.74 -> v1.11.75
- Honoroit : v0.9.24 -> v0.9.25
- Hydrogen : v0.4.1 -> v0.5.0
- Miniflux : 2.1.4 -> 2.2.0
- Postmoogle : v0.9.20 -> v0.9.21
- Signal : v0.6.3 -> v0.7.0
- Slack : latest -> v0.1.0
- Nginx : 1.27.0-alpine -> 1.27.1-alpine
Service Updates: Migration to GitHub
We’ve previously been using Gitlab, because other platforms lacked features we needed.
It seems like Github has caught up and provides a better platform with a larger community of users.
As such, we’ve migrated all of our Gitlab repositories to Github. Most of our repositories were migrated to the new etkecc organization, while non-Matrix-related Ansible roles (which were already used by the MASH playbook ) now live under the MASH organization.
There is a lot of housekeeping to do (e.g., updating various website links), but the migration part of the process is now complete.
With this change, we hope to achieve improved collaboration on our FOSS projects!
Stable Updates Published
- Cinny : v4.0.3 -> v4.1.0
- Element : v1.11.72 -> v1.11.73
- Exim Relay : 4.98-r0-0 -> 4.98-r0-1
- Jitsi : stable-9584-1 -> stable-9646
- Traefik : v3.1.1 -> v3.1.2
Service Update: New Component - Maubot
Maubot is available for order. Existing customers may request it by contacting us
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