Changes to Bugzilla

Time has passed, and it has come time to update to the latest version of Bugzilla again. Sadly not everything managed to come along for the ride this time though. Our custom theme has been bitten by a series of incompatibilities with the newer version of Bugzilla which has prevented people from changing their email address and entering bugs in some cases among others things. As it is more important the site is usable we've had to disable it.

We are interested however in getting it fixed - those who have knowledge of HTML/CSS can help in particular. More details can be found in this kde-community post: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2014q3/000860.html

Twitter and Planet

Just a quick service announcement: it seems that Twitter, in their infinite wisdom decided to completely kill the old RSS feed style which was used by the vast majority of Twitter feeds on planetkde.org. Unfortunately, while it is still possible to get RSS feeds out of Twitter there is absolutely no way to convert the old feeds into the new style.

So we've been forced to remove all of the now broken feeds - which was done in this commit. For those who are affected - you can easily restore your feed using the new syntax: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=<name>.

A real pity that they have not even tried to migrate anything over or provide any compatibility what so ever - my apologies to those who are affected.

Continuous Integration for KDE

 “The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.” - Thomas Kempis.

Long time no blog. Today we announce the expansion of build.kde.org - now providing continuous integration to all KDE main modules on Git, for both the current development and stable branches. It also executes the tests each project has - and builds are triggered when pushes are made to git.kde.org.

Please check the status of projects you are involved or interested with there to make sure things are working properly. If you find anything wrong, please let us know. If you want to keep an eye on builds in general, I recommend visiting http://build.kde.org/view/All/builds.

Thanks go to Torgny Nyblom for writing the fantastic suite of scripts which do the heavy lifting required to make all that just work - it wouldn't be possible to do this without them.

For those interested in the technical details: each project (apart from the external dependencies) is installed into a separate prefix, and ccache is used to accelerate builds. To make sure tests run smoothly, Xvfb and kdeinit4 are launched to create a environment suitable for running tests. However - only those dependencies which projects explicitly list in the kde-build-metadata file are available to them for both the build and tests.

KTorrent forum joins the KDE forums

As some of you will already know, the KTorrent forum has now been imported into the KDE Forums. This continues our effort to unite all forum-based community support, under one umbrella.

By uniting our forums we unite the community as one, maximising the ability to support our users in the best manner we can.

If any other developer would like to create a forum to help their users, or migrate from their existing forum, feel free to contact us.

A new Identity

As some of you may be aware, we recently launched a major overhaul to KDE Identity. It brings major improvements to quite a few areas and should make working with Identity much easier in the future.

The new application is completely custom application I wrote to run KDE Identity, based upon the awesome Yii framework. Sadly most of the improvements are under the hood, and don't lend themselves well to screenshots. The biggest change with the new version is the workflow - changes made to your account no longer require you to confirm the changes repeatedly.

Thanks go to Ingo Malchow, Richard Moore, Emil Sedgh and Tom Albers for their help in theming, testing and improving the application.

Enjoy!

Just a few mail stats

As someone who moderates a few mailing lists, I was wondering why some mailing lists get swamped in spam at times. Is our spam filter failing us? So I decided to get some statistics on how our spam filter performs.

When I checked this against the spam scores assigned to the mail webmaster recieved I noticed that all of the spam messages were in the "Determined as spam, accepted" category - which is practically unnoticable on the graph. So it seems our spam filter is doing it's job pretty well.

While I had the log files open, I decided to see just how much email we sent out each day too:

Not bad - we deliver ~3 million emails each month to people subscribed to kde.org mailing lists and holders of kde.org addresses.

KDE email problems?

Just as a quick little public announcement - if you are having problems with your subscription to kde.org mailing lists, you may wish to check that your provider does not use SORBS to filter your email.

It appears that our email server has (for one reason or another) been listed on their blacklists. We are currently working on getting delisted, but that may take a few days unfortunately.