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I hope this doesn't violate the low-quality rule. For those who don't know, when you right click an archive in Dolphin, the extract menu has a "Extract archive here, autodetect subfolder" option and its absolutely brilliant! If you've ever extracted a zip, tar, etc and ended up with files splattered everywhere this feature will prevent that. Basically when you choose this option it will:

• Look to see if the archive has a top level folder, if it does, it will extract it normally
• If it does not (so all of the files are at the top level), it will automatically create a folder for the archive and extract those top level files into it

It's something I really wish other file managers had, and is just another one of those features from the KDE team that gives me the "The developer(s) who created this also use this in their daily lives" impression (which is not to say that others don't). You can of course just open your favorite archive utility and manually check, then manually make the folder yourself and extract the files into there, but this lets me skip those couple of steps and I appreciate that so much.

It's update time again!

The Outpost has been successfully updated to Lemmy 0.18.4, the most notable change in this release is that the "View Context" button should now be resolved, allowing you to for example see your original reply when you receive a notification that someone replied to your comment.

That same fix should apply to mobile applications as well, and shouldn't require updates on those apps (assuming the functionality worked in those apps before 0.18.3).

As always, I'll keep this post pinned for 24 hours or so, just for visibility and in case anyone experiences any potential issues that crop up.

Addressing Feedback

• In Season 22, we’re updating those weekly ritual challenge requirements so players can complete their nine challenges in any ritual playlist they’d like, as opposed to having to complete three each across Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit playlists. We’ll also be increasing the frequency of ritual engram drops after completing ritual activities, and we’re making the latest ritual loot pool weapons focusable at their respective vendors at the start of the Season for the first time, rather than needing to wait until the following Season to chase those god rolls.

PvP

• New PvP Map (Season 22): Multiplex

• New PvP Modifier - Checkmate: Checkmate is a modifier where rich Primary weapon fights can happen more often, and gun skill can be augmented by communication and strong positioning. Primary weapon damage has been tuned to feel different than the rest of the game without being jarring, reducing the gap between the faster killing weapons and the average time-to-kill, and in general pushing longer range Primaries into slower killing profiles. Player health has been increased, all ability cooldowns are lengthened, and Special ammunition must be earned via gameplay and is not dropped on death. This all results in slightly longer combat encounters that reward skill and consistency.

  • Checkmate will be available in Crucible Labs from Week 5 to Week 10. We will start off with two weeks of Checkmate Control, then switch it up with two weeks of Checkmate Survival, and finally, two weeks of Checkmate Rumble to finish off its trial run for Season 22.

• New PvP Mode - Relic: Relic is a 6v6 party mode where players wreak havoc and destruction on their foes with relic weapons. Relics include the Aegis from Vault of Glass, the Synaptic Spear from Season of the Risen, and the Scythe from Season of the Haunted. Each player charges their personal relic energy by defeating opponents with their normal loadout. Upon reaching full charge, players can acquire a relic from a relic depot. Defeating relic holders and using the relics to defeat opponents earns points for the team.

  • Whereas Checkmate is heavily focused on gunfights, Relic is intended to provide lighthearted gameplay that can be enjoyed by anyone, similar to Mayhem and Team Scorched. Relic will be available in Crucible Labs from Week 1 to Week 4, and again in Week 11 until the close of the Season. We look forward to hearing your feedback on both Checkmate and Relic when they roll out next Season.

• Matchmaking Updates: Our quest to constantly improve matchmaking is always ongoing, and in Season 22, we’re modifying our loose skill-based matchmaking settings for Control and Iron Banner. These new settings will look to improve matchmaking times and experiences for players who find themselves at the upper or lower ends of the skill spectrum, and for those playing in low-population regions or times.

  • The team is also adding loose Fireteam Matchmaking to the Crucible rotators, including Labs, to ensure players are being evenly matched against similar Fireteam sizes without the need for a Freelance node. Additionally, we’ll be tackling an issue with lobby balancing that can misallocate players over certain skill levels.

• Also coming in Season 23: Looking further ahead, we’re planning to deliver a new Iron Banner mode for Season 23, along with a brand-new Häkke Aggressive Frame Strand Pulse Rifle as our newest Competitive Division weapon reward. The Mercurial Overreach Adaptive Frame Arc Sniper Rifle will remain available for competitors throughout Season 22.

  • As a reminder, we’re also focusing our map reprisal efforts on porting The Citadel from 2018 to the Crucible in Season 23. We all have fond memories of dominating Control with our fireteams on this one and can’t wait to see what you do with the latest arsenal out there in The Dreaming City.

Vanguard

• Vanguard Medals: will be available in Vanguard Ops and Nightfalls starting in Season 22. After first being introduced in last year’s Guardian Games and their continued success in this year’s event, we have decided to bring them in full-time to spice things up in our Vanguard playlists.

  • Medals will contribute to scoring, allowing players to attain higher scores and reputation multipliers by performing unique actions and doing cool things. Our goal here is to reward players for playing well, and not require players to go out of their way to grind for score. In short: we don't want you to feel like you have to compromise your build in order to boost your score with additional medals.
  • Some medals from Guardian Games will be exclusive to Guardian Games, such as finishing champions/elites.

• We’ve also recently focused more of our teams’ resources into more varied and frequent Seasonal activities, such as Battlegrounds, that can later make their way into Vanguard playlists alongside our Strikes and eventually serve as new additions to Nightfall and Grandmaster playlists. While this can come at the cost of other content in a given year, we feel this exchange has been worth the extra investment for the overall health of our playlists. As a result, we’ll have additional Battlegrounds coming into the Nightfall and Grandmaster Nightfall rotations in Seasons 22 and 23 to keep players on their toes before The Final Shape launches.

Gambit

• While we don’t have plans to dedicate more resources to significantly transform Gambit, we do have a few updates planned for the year of The Final Shape. These include porting the Cathedral of Scars map and its beautiful Dreaming City setting into the latest version of Destiny 2, as well as adding the Shadow Legion and Lucent Hive enemy types.

• We’re also reducing the number of Gambit-specific Seasonal Challenges starting in Season 22, so players won’t need to bank motes to be able to earn that big purse of Bright Dust for completing nearly every challenge in the Season. Finally, we’re adding Fireteam Matchmaking to Gambit next Season, which will replace the Freelance node and should result in faster, better matchmaking by combining both Gambit playlists. We’ll keep an eye on reception and player engagement after these additions take place, and we hope you’ll visit ‘ol Drifter next Season to get your hands on his new Void Machine Gun.

Armor Set Updates

• A long time ago, we shared a plan to address concerns on reward balance. Players have pointed out that we didn’t release a new armor set for the ritual playlists (Vanguard, Crucible, Gambit) with Lightfall as previously called out in our yearly release schedule. Delivering ritual armor sets at the rates we have in the past has become increasingly challenging, especially considering these sets have historically had very low adoption by players as both base armor and cosmetic ornaments.

  • At this time, we are amending our delivery plans for how often we refresh these sets and will no longer be creating a new set for every expansion. However, we are prioritizing the delivery of a new ritual armor set alongside The Final Shape to infuse some new looks you’ll be able to show off from your time in the Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit playlists. We also have a new armor set for Trials of Osiris releasing in just a few short weeks!

Game Security

• Over the course of the year, we have invested further in data science and machine learning, building confidence in the detections they produce. These tools allow us to observe and evaluate player behavior in new ways and issue an increasing number of actions in response.

• In addition, we have continued to adapt new policies to protect players, including the Abuse of External Accessibility Tools policy. The development of this policy has allowed us to catch cheaters that we may not have otherwise. This policy not only gives us an avenue to action this form of cheating, but it has also spurred us to investigate player behavior in new ways.

• Finally, we've worked with BattlEye to address network manipulation tools, improving our data collection, detection, and mitigation strategies. Competition is best when fair, so we will continue to issue bans or restrictions to those abusing these methods.

Stability Updates

• Moving toward 7.2.0 (Season 22 launch), we are beginning to do internal “chaos testing” using the new code we added and are already using that data to make more improvements in the 7.2.0 update, as well as verify current fixes we have planned for the Season. As we do this work, we aren’t just focusing on the Claims system outlined in our roadmap. Our efforts also cover stability across all 50+ services that help to make Destiny 2 run. These include taking a close look at our load balancing code, service-to-service communication code, internal message processing pipelines, and more.

• If 7.2.0 is focused on detecting and fixing current stability issues, the theme of 7.3.0 (Season 23 launch) will be helping to protect us against stability issues that might occur in the future. Work here will focus on systems like auto-recovery, making internal systems healthier, and further isolating systems from one another so that a problem in one area is less likely to cascade into issues in other areas. We want our players to have the best possible experience, and we view our work with Destiny Services as a long-term project that we will continue to invest in beyond Season 23 and into the future.

Seasonal Structure

• As we mentioned back in February, we’ve been working behind the scenes to shake up the Seasonal paradigm this year to subvert player expectations and make each Season feel unique. We know our players are looking for more variety in repeatable Seasonal activities, and more than anything, we want to constantly surprise everyone with what comes next in each Season.

Quality of Life Upgrades

• Cosmetic Favoriting: At long last, you’ll be able to pin up to 100 of your favorite shaders, ornaments, and emotes to the top of the list starting in Season 22.

• Stasis Aspects and Fragments moved to vendor system: Any character who has completed the Beyond Light campaign will be able to acquire all available Stasis Aspects and Fragments from Elsie Bray on Europa starting next Season.

• Transmats will now be unlocks: Like shaders before them, transmats will now be stored as unlocks on your account, rather than consumable items. Feel free to change transmats at will without needing to grab copies from Collections or find them in the wild.

• Wish-Ender pursuit improvements: The Wish-Ender quest has gone through a number of changes throughout the years, and in Season 22, it becomes a real quest. No more charged or uncharged discs sitting in your inventory – just a single quest strand in your quest log.

• Resources tab added to Collections: This is a change we are really excited about – we now have a Resources tab in the Collections, which shows you all of the currencies, upgrade materials, and engrams in the game, appropriately categorized, with information on how to acquire it, as well as what to do with it once you have it.

• Iron Banner Challenges split:

  • With Pinnacle rewards not being as big of a draw as they once were Season-over-Season since Season of the Deep began, we felt it was time to split the Pinnacle acquisition and reputation multipliers we added back in Season of the Haunted.

  • Starting in Season 22, Iron Banner will have two different stacking challenges each day: one for players who just want their reputation multiplier which does not require using specific Seasonal subclasses, and one for players who are going after their Pinnacle rewards, which does require using Seasonal subclasses.

• Ritual Rank Ups immediately: Dating all the way back to Season 3, ritual reputations (previously known as Valor, Glory, and Infamy) waited until you hit orbit to process any rank-ups, because the almost-full screen banner would overwrite the scoreboard if it showed up earlier. When we revamped and streamlined reputations over the past few years, we moved the rank-up banner to the bottom of the screen and made them less conspicuous, but we left the processing of the ranks until you hit orbit. Now we’ve finally taken the step and made the rank-up process immediately at the end of an activity. No more waiting for your rewards... now they’ll show up right away in your loot stream.

Sandbox Updates

• New Strand Aspects: At the start of Season 22, we’re adding three new Strand Aspects to enhance the Strand kit of each class by adding a unique dynamic gameplay element. These Aspects will be Whirling Maelstrom for Hunter, Banner of War for Titans, and Weavewalk for Warlocks. Stay tuned for more info as we get closer to the launch of the Season.

• Exotic Armor Reworks, Pt. 2: Similar to our first wave of Exotic revamps in Season of the Deep, the team is reworking another batch of underused Exotic armor pieces in Season 22 to shake things up and give players a new reason to dive into their Vaults. Watch for a new Developer Insights article going live next week to cover all the changes we’ve got coming.

• New Weapon Subfamilies Incoming: Looking further into the future, we’ll be introducing some entirely new weapon subfamilies with The Final Shape. Tune into the Showcase on August 22nd to get your first look at some of these in action, as well as some other unexpected additions to Destiny 2’s arsenal yet to come.

• Previously mentioned Weapon tuning updates

Hello folks!

This is just a quick post to notify everyone that The Outpost has been updated to Lemmy 0.18.3 - just like the last couple of releases, I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible (while also giving it enough time to make sure there were no show stopping bugs, release was just barely over 24 hours ago) since it includes some nice optimizations.

Some of those nice optimizations include:

• Security improvements
• SQL query optimizations (which should lead to better and more consistently stable response times hopefully)
• Fixes to the post rank calculations (should resolve random 1 month+ old posts from showing up in the "Hot" / "Active" feeds)

So far everything looks good, but if you happen to see anything that looks out of place please don't hesitate to let me know!

Finally, some updates on material caps! They're as follows:

• Ascendant Shards: 10 => 30
• Ascendant Alloy: 10 => 30
• Enhancement Prism: 50 => 100

They also announced some incoming weapons to the various ritual playlists, along with the fact that focusing for new ritual weapons will be available right away, rather than having to wait for the next season to come around to focus weapons that have newly entered.

A good read all around.

Microsoft is ending Xbox Live Gold, and it will be replaced with a new tier of Game Pass called "Core", starting September 14, 2023.

Most things will remain the same (such as the price), but there are a couple of notable changes:

• The "Games With Gold" program will not be continued (1)
• Instead, members will gain access to 25 games from the Game Pass library, as selected by Microsoft (with supposedly a few being added every year)

Subscribers of Xbox Live Gold will be automatically moved over to Game Pass Core when it starts on September 14th.

(1) In regards to members with previous GwG items in their libraries, any claimed Xbox One titles will remain in their library as long as they continue their Game Pass Core subscription, and any claimed Xbox 360 games will be available regardless of subscription status - just like how Games with Gold worked previously.

It certainly feels like an end of an era with the Xbox Live Gold name going away.

Are you a fan of good-looking graphs? We've got them!

Hello everyone! A couple of weeks ago I made a tool for Lemmy instance admins to export statistics from a Lemmy Postgres database over to InfluxDB, which is a database that specializes in time-series based data. The idea being to allow people to track stats about their instance (such as the amount of comments, posts, etc that it knows about) over time.

I've put together a Grafana instance for The Outpost, and a dashboard is available here to allow everyone to get an overview on how things are looking over here. I try to be as transparent as possible when providing services that others use, so I have no problem with this being public.

There is no sensitive data, the InfluxDB source itself only has totals/counts - for example, it "knows" how many comments have been made by people on this instance, but it doesn't know who made those comments. That data is only known to Lemmy itself, and its own database which cannot be connected to from the outside world.

I also do not mind the dashboard link being passed around to others, which probably doesn't need to be explicitly stated for obvious reasons (if its on the internet, its already public by nature of the internet) but I figured I'd do so just in case!

The metrics at the top section (labeled "Extras") should be taken with a grain of salt, as I'm definitely not a statistics expert so putting those functions together to get that data is purely a "best guess" at how to calculate those (more so the second row - "Rate of Incoming Comments", and "Avg # of New Comments/Posts Every 5m" as the heatmaps are pretty easy and self-explanatory to put together).

For some reason the breakdown charts under the Registration section don't render correctly on the public/unauthenticated version of the dashboard (along with the "nice" labels I've set on all of the graphs on that page) but they're just pie charts of the user/email overview charts that they are right next to. Public Dashboards in Grafana are considered a beta feature so I suspect its just a bug.

Just to make sure the backend metrics database doesn't get inadvertently slammed, the unauthenticated version of the dashboard is set to only auto-refresh every 5 minutes but manually refreshing the page will pull updated versions of all the stats in case you're curious about how it changes on a minute basis (the data is only exported from Lemmy->Influx every minute, so refreshing the page every 30 seconds for example won't really have any effect).

I also have totally not spent a large amount of time having this dashboard open on my second monitor just watching the numbers, colors, and graphs change - that would be silly! It would also be incredibly silly for me to encourage you to do the same thing!

I'll skip pinning this post as its not really a critical announcement, but nonetheless if you have any questions about this I'm happy to answer them for you!

First things first, this instance has not been affected by the cross-site scripting exploit that has impacted a few of the larger instances - just wanted to quell any potential sources of panic.

TL;DR for the rest of the post - we're not impacted by this issue, but just as an added precaution everyone has been signed out and you'll need to sign back in.

This exploit appears to be coming from Lemmy's Markdown parser when handling custom emojis - we do not have any here. Custom emojis from remote/federated instances do not seem to trigger the issue either.

That being said, since this exploit was using custom emojis as a way of hijacking gathering JWTs to then be able to login on behalf of others, I've force expired all login sessions across the instance as an added precaution. This impacts both the standard web interface, and any mobile/third party apps that use the Lemmy API.

If you're reading this after logging back in, you're good to go - some mobile apps may not properly notify you however that you're not logged in since not all API actions require authentication (for example, the API wouldn't require auth to access this post) and thus may not re-prompt you.

I'd recommend just logging out of any mobile apps you were signed into, and then log back in, which will generate a new token and prevent you from getting not_logged_in errors when you do finally try to perform an action that requires authentication (such as viewing your inbox, or casting votes).

Additionally, as of the time of current writing, Beehaw is offline from their end so if you're subscribed to any of their communities you won't see updates from that community at all (in terms of new comments, posts, votes, etc) until they come back online - any content that our instance already knows about of course is still available, but if you try to reply to one your comment won't be visible on their side.

I'll be watching the various instance admin groups for updates on this issue, and I see there is already a pull request opened against Lemmy-UI (the frontend for Lemmy) to fix the root issue. As soon as a release is provided with the patch I'll do another immediate upgrade to as well.

If anyone has any questions, please don't hesitate to let me know - apologies if you're like me and have 7 different Lemmy apps downloaded that need to all be re-signed into 😅

Hello all!

As a heads up, I've gone ahead and processed a rollout of Lemmy 0.18.1 which was just released.

Generally, for updates I like to create a maintenance window a couple of days ahead of time and communicate this, just in case something were to go wrong then no one is left in the dark as to what is happening - however, Lemmy 0.18.1 contains some very important performance and federation fixes so I felt it was best to just go ahead and upgrade ASAP.

Of course, the VM that this instance runs on is backed up automatically every day twice, and I always take a backup right before making any changes as well.

Backups are taken as snapshots of the whole VM, but snapshots can be a bit slow to restore due to the time it takes to pull the VM's storage from my backups server (which is in the same datacenter but there are still other factors that impact the time it takes to read->stream/transmit->write the backup back onto the VM) so in the case of a restore being needed, performance would most likely experience some degradation and is also time that federated data would vanish (from the period that the restore was started to the time it ended). This is why the maintenance window for upgrades is always an hour at minimum.

Thankfully, from what I understand, 0.18.0 -> 0.18.1 didn't result in too many major database changes, which is where the biggest chance for things to go wrong come from (due to database migrations not getting properly applied), but there were still some in general.

Anyways, enough rambling from me - we're all set now, but as always if you happen to see anything go wrong, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll personally be of course looking out as well (which is why I don't do upgrades when I'm about to go to sleep!) through general usage and keeping an eye on the server logs (its amazing how fast they fly through given that every single federated action generates a new line).

I'll keep this post pinned for a couple of days just as an easy way to report any potential problems.

I came across a thread earlier that was asking others about this, and I shared how it came about for this instance, and decided that it would be a good dedicated post here in general just in case anyone is curious:

I started a habit a while back ago of naming any servers I run based off of names from Greek mythology - my primary server is Zeus but most forms of just "Zeus" in domain form are already taken. Similarly, I call the quasi-internal network that this server runs (since it's a hypervisor) "ZeusNet"...

Problem with that name is "ZeusNet.net" is redundant and would irk me, I wanted something that still ends with the .net TLD (though my personal domain ends with .network).

Thus, zeuslink.net is what I came up with given that "link" can mean "network" and the combination isn't as redundant as "...net.net"!

Funnily enough, originally my instance was originally under the colony subdomain which I quite liked... But unfortunately I didn't set things up properly due to how I have everything else setup, and I had already dipped just enough in the federation that when I reset everything so that it actually worked properly, the keys that my server identified with no longer matched which broke my ability to federate properly. Which then forced me to reset everything again under a completely different subdomain (I'm glad it was on a subdomain instead of the root domain for that reason) since Lemmy doesn't have a "self destruct" option like Mastodon has (which tells all connected instances "Hey, I'm going down - forget you knew me" as far as I understand it).

And that, is the story of how we ended up with the name "[The] Outpost" on the domain zeuslink.net!

Hello everyone!

Its almost time for another Lemmy update, this time to a fairly major release! I've held back on updating our instance here immediately just to make sure there are no ground-breaking issues, however it seems like no one is reporting any major issues with 0.18.0 which is a good sign.

Assuming nothing comes up, The Outpost will be updating to 0.18.0 on Tuesday @ 3AM UTC and a maintenance notice will be provided on the status page just like last time to provide communication of the update.

One small caveat is that the captcha will not be available in 0.18.0 (and will return in 0.18.1) which while isn't a guaranteed deterrent against bots, it is at least something. Like a good chunk of instances out there, signing up requires approval via an application which looks like this:

To verify that you are human, please explain why you want to create an account on this site (or simply, your favorite food will do as well!)

However it wouldn't exactly be that hard to tie in a LLM to provide a generated response, and there are reports of exactly that occurring already.

So, in effort to try to combat against bot/spam registrations, The Outpost will be requiring email verification in order to register for an account (which was actually already the case at the very start of this instance's lifecycle, but due to reported bugs with 0.17.3 it was disabled to make sure it wasn't preventing legitimate users from signing up / logging in).

To those who do not know why bots/spam is a bad thing aside from the obvious, it can cause harm to remote communities/instances, and that goes against one of the core rules of this instance.

That being said, anyone who has an account here has been "grandfathered in" so to speak - or in other words, all current accounts have been marked as having their email verified (and if an email wasn't originally provided, a [email protected] was filled in just to make sure Lemmy didn't "freak out" over a verified-but-blank email address).

Do note: Updating your email address will trigger re-verification as to be expected, and to my knowledge you won't be able to log back in until the new address has been verified.

At some point if there is a better alternative to combating bot/spam applications then email verification can be disabled again (thus making providing an email address optional).

For new folks who are wanting to potentially register at The Outpost (or many of the other Lemmy instances that require email verification) if you do not want to give out your main email address I'd recommend using something such as Firefox Relay (which is what I use), Apple's "Hide My Email" service, any other similar service, or even just a burner email address (you only need it to confirm your account, though it is also the only way to reset your password should you lose access to your account).

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let me know (via a comment, a DM, or on Matrix.

Edit: We should be all set now! I'll leave this post pinned over the next day as a "just in case" though.

Hello!

The Outpost will be undergoing maintenance to perform an update for Lemmy at 3AM UTC. The maintenance window covers an hour, though I do not expect the update will actually take that long to process.

Should any hiccups arise during this period, notes will be posted on The Outpost's status page.