[Raion]

I've been keeping this under wraps and only sharing it with a couple of people but we have a new gallery application in development. Everything will be migrated over but it will take probably a few months more to get it ready; it depends upon a number of factors. 

Let me explain why Gallery 3 has to go:

1. No PostgreSQL compatibility. As I'm trying to move a lot of our infrastructure over to that, I want to ensure that PostgreSQL is an option. 

2. In maintenance mode. Brad Dutton, the primary developer of gallery 3 at this time is not really interested in adding a whole lot of features and I completely empathize with his view. It's simply impractical with how bad it is. 

3. Provisioning issues. I'm sure those of you who have tried to sign up have been frustrated because email doesn't work and that's down to it not supporting SMTP properly, it wants to really use PHP mail() instead, and I'm not going to do that. Additionally even if it did it would still require manual provisioning. 

4. Future interoperability. I plan to bring single sign-on to everything here to better tie our systems together. I know keeping track of passwords sucks. I haven't explained how this is going to be done because I'm not 100% sure, but it'll probably centralize on the forum and a first login to another service will autoprovision it. This is not part of the first release of the new software, but it will be something added soon!

I wanted to thank everybody who has continued to be a patron or donater, and those of you who just contribute discussion, thanks too. In this case a significant portion of the initial costs were covered by your contributions, I know it's hard to envision our costs, but they can and to add up, though I don't pay myself for any of the work I do for the community because doing so would be scumbagish. 

If you want this to be done faster you might want to consider becoming a patron if you're not already, or participate in the upcoming group buy. At this point I've already exhausted the allocations of money paid to our developer that came from the site, so I'm paying the rest out of my own pocket. 

I'm going to reemphasize, if you have a problem with your gallery account currently I am willing to fix it until we launch the new site. Let's get you set up as soon as possible. I'm not sure what kind of pains might be involved with switching over once we have all of the backend code done as I'm sure there will be security in other issues to take care of. 

There will be more information about the group buy including a poll here. Because of an inability to find a good software I'm going to create a polling subforum soon. This is going to be a temporary measure simply to ensure proper access control, you will be required to have 10 posts to participate in the poll, and be over 7 days old. This is plenty of time for anybody because the poll will run for about a month. 

The redesign that this is bringing will also eventually result in a new wiki and other bits.

[vishnu]

For what it's worth, I wrote an online Calcutta wagering system in Perl a few years back, that used SMTP to notify bettors when their wager had been outbid. It worked seamlessly and isn't very complicated, if you think you could make use of it it's entirely yours, public domain, to use in any way you see fit... 😜

---

Hmm, that said here's a screenshot of the first bit of the sendmail subroutine, it looks a bit more complicated than I remember. 🤪

   

[Raion]

Your code does not appear to be using any authentication. That's the fundamental difference between old fashioned CGI and PHP and new stuff; you can't rely on built-in MTAs because even if you have everything right according to the regulations Google will just silently dispatch it and others will mark it as spam or bounce It back because it's not authenticated.

Basically I use the PEAR mail class ( with a username and password ) or phpmailer to send via SMTP properly. It's like as if you're sending a message from Mozilla Thunderbird only it's a PHP script.
If you want an example I'm happy to share it but unfortunately the old way of doing things just doesn't cut it anymore. I worked 7+ years in various rhel system administration jobs and support jobs and it was always problematic to try to do it that way.

I'm not putting you down by any means it's just that the way things are run nowadays is so crazily different that it's difficult to apply that knowledge directly to this. There are those that will say that they can do it just fine, good for them. I have a rule anyways that I don't run mta's on local servers and a significant reason why is to prevent usage of hack scripts that use refer a friend or PHP mailers without authentication.

[vishnu]

Since Internet gambling is technically illegal, I only ever used this program on my own server, which was running Sendmail. It worked perfectly well but I have no idea how it would work on anything other than Slackware, because that's the only distro I've ever used. To the best of my knowledge no intermediary servers between my Slackware machine and any of the end user's email servers ever bounced anything but I can certainly understand your reason for wishing to use authentication.

[Raion]

Yeah, I can demonstrate one day collaboratively, as I would love to educate and exchange information and notes with people of different backgrounds on computing topics outside of IRIX of how it works, but basically IME the big issue is that in email MIME headers, send mail/other cli MTA interfaces omit specific header info. This is also true when you call them from a CGI or Perl or PHP or whatever. Because you're not passing ae authentication header, basically. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with how email relay is used to work well most providers would reject your email if it was sent from an open relay and this operates on a similar purpose. Messages sent in this manner are more average likely to be a result of hacks, and Google, Yahoo etc don't care about RFC's because nobody's enforcing them. When you actually authenticate to an SMTP server, which is what say PEAR mail or say Net::SMTP can do, it adds a header indicating to the recipient that this message was provided to the server through authentication.

It's possible even in 2022 to get that working despite that but it's an economy of time issue, and in PHP when using an external class uses less code that is more legible it's hard to sit there and say that isn't worth it.

[Shiunbird]

Mail is a huuuuuge PITA and it took me a long while to find a setup that works fine.
The only issue I have with it is active-standby, but now I am satisfied and I only now keep my gmail as a placeholder for my nickname and name.

Every time I catch something important there, I move it to my own.

There's also a sense of responsibility in owning your setup.

I use a K-9 based client on my de-googled android phone and if I turn on hiding the User-Agent, sometimes it bounces.
I suspect User-Agents that come from very old or unusual clients can also get bounced. Any ideas?

@vishnu: If you want to keep authentication out of your script, a thing you could do in your mail server is to assume that e-mail from a certain source belongs to a user, by setting sender-dependent transport or transport maps. The credentials would be stored somewhere else, not where you have your script.
I've used this setup successfully to send email from my Octane.

edit: postfix will do this.

[Raion]

Once we're finished with theming and configuration, I will start posting code and a dev version for some users to try out.

[Raion]

We have moved on mostly from theming and other configurations and we are now working on the back end. As soon as I have something that works more than just as a placeholder and we can actually get things done, expect a public repo to be opened.

From here I'm not sure how long it'll be but I hope that this will be done by the end of summer. We have moved steadily thanks to all the generous donations and love and support from everybody here.

For those of you who have personally contributed to the project, I appreciate that and so does our primary developer.

[Raion]

The code is still being worked on. Currently we have attained working admin uploads, roles and basic system tasks.

The code will likely be open sourced within the next 3-6 weeks. It will be far from a complete project however and I appreciate everyone's patience because I cannot wait to show it off. The main blocker at the moment is that we want some type of demo running on our site and in order to do that I need to sit down for a couple days with our primary developer and get him acquainted with our systems. At that point we will start showing it off.

[sudolinux]

Ah nice, is it going to replace to forum ?