Beehaw Support

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Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our September 2024 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.


if you can see this, it's up  

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.


after a few months, we're finally stable enough to put another one of these out. to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought—and very little of the functionality we expected came to fruition—so it's essentially taken us six months to re-establish our financial situation.

August's numbers are:

overall expenses this month: $183.58

$142.13 for hosting the site

  • $112.00 for hosting the site itself
  • $22.40 for backups
  • $7.73 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

  • $24.00 for hosting Hive
  • $4.80 for backups

~$4.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

  • $0.00 for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam - we currently don't send enough emails to trigger the threshold for payment)
  • ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$8.49 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $176.28

unsurprisingly, the mess of a switch-over, the several months it's taken to sort everything out, and our minimal encouragement of donations in the interim of sorting things out has resulted in a decrease in funding. for the first time in a long time, we're not breaking even—and without the one-time donation we'd be out about $100 this month.

breakdown:

  • 15 monthly contributions, totaling $80.82
  • 0 yearly contributions, totaling $0.00
  • 1 one-time donation, totaling $95.46

total end of month balance: $6,849.83

expense runway, assuming no further donations: about 3 years


this dovetails into an announcement we need to make: we need your help to gradually rebuild our donation base. to be clear, we are obviously not in any danger of shutting down right now—but we have taken a very material hit in terms of finances[^1] and as a result we're now running off of the financial cushion you've given us. even though we have a long expense runway, we'd like to proactively return to breaking even and not having to think about how much we're losing per month.

our current monthly contributions are about $100 short of breaking even, so consider that our rough financial goal. please donate if you are able.

unfortunately—and as mentioned at the top—the tools to switch over any previous subscription you may have had on Open Collective Foundation don't appear to exist. this means you will have to manually resubmit your information on Open Collective Europe Foundation if you haven't already. (we may or may not send out a mass-email to our current/previous donors in the future to this effect.)

[^1]: The differential between what we would have had OCF stayed up and what we do have on OCEF now could be as high as $4,600. That is split between the six months of paused donations (likely $3,000-$3,600, averaging our financial reports previously) and the six months of hosting expenses we've covered with our cushion (likely around $1,000-$1,200 given our hosting costs have not changed). We're also now losing a slightly larger cut of what we take in. In sum: we've lost out on a lot of potential runway for the site.

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tl;dr: Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, please direct your donations there effective immediately.


In some good news, we've successfully moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation as our new fiscal host. This process has been mercifully quick and fairly painless, for which we're thankful.

Going forward, please make all donations to the Beehaw Collective there instead of the previous Beehaw page affiliated with Open Collective Foundation. We'll be mothballing that one following this post going live and according to OCF should be able to merge the page back into our new one sometime after April.

Our balance of approximately $7,100 is in the process of being transferred and we do not expect issues there. OCF just submitted a transfer request today for us, and OCEF will let us know when that balance hits our new collective.

We would encourage you to manually restart your contribution as soon as possible just for sake of ease and because our financial schedule will be very different going forward. However, starting later this month—at least based on what Open Collective is saying—anybody still signed up to make contributions to the old page should receive an email with the following information:

  • an invitation to renew your contributions on the new collective page
  • direction to a page which will be pre-loaded with the amount and frequency of the contribution you made on the old collective, which you will then confirm

So, don't fret too much if you can't immediately and manually switch. Spaced email reminders should also go out until Open Collective Foundation shuts down at the end of the year. If any of this does not happen, please page us and we'll see what's up.

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I logged in earlier and wrote out a reply to a message in my inbox but it wouldn't go through when I hit send. After waiting and retrying I investigated further and discovered that the thread had been locked. I then checked the Modlog to see if it had been locked whilst I was typing and discovered that it had been locked 12 hours earlier.

Why can I click on the reply button and open up the reply box on a locked thread when viewing a post in my inbox?

When viewing the thread directly the reply button and box are available but you cannot type in the text box so I suppose I'll be grateful that not everyone who attempts to interact with a locked thread will have their time wasted like mine was.

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For the past four months beehaw has been unreachable to those of us on the Tor network. Glad to see access was finally restored. Was there an attack?

I could really use a way to periodically backup my posts to my local disk so if Tor is spontaneously blocked again I at least have my history. I’ve not found a Lemmy equivalent for Mastodon Archive.

(edit) For security, it would be a good idea to setup an onion instance. The Tor network has built-in DDoS protection for onion hosts.

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Seriously why? Discuss.online has horrible moderation and open-signups, and Lemm.ee isn't very much better. If lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were completely nuked to avoid the moderation headache or risks from two large open servers, why aren't lemm.ee and discuss.online banned as well?

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Steps:

  • Login to Beehaw.
  • See your username in the account dropdown.
  • Reload/Refresh the page.
  • Account dropdown has become a Login link.

Notes

I’m running Latest Safari on iPadOS and iOS 18+ The problem has been happening for months so include 17 in that list of versions.

I do use AdGuard / uBlock, but I don’t have this issue with other web apps. I will test with it disabled and report back.

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My Unread Messages is at 2 (it was at 1 for a month or so, but since weeks its at 2 now). Clicking it shows nothing. Maybe there are messages from people I blocked? When I get real new unread messages, then counter goes up and it works like always. Reading those messages (or clicking them as read) will decrease the number, up to 2.

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We were wondering if the docs etc here could be rewritten in such a way so as to not call all of us human since some of us are not.

Much like being transgender, being otherkin, alter{human/being} or transspecies can have a lot of dysphoria attached to it and we have had to at least explicitly tell one person on lemmy that we are not human even though it is in our profile.

We think that being more inclusive is always a good thing and will gladly work with those who can edit the docs etc in order to find more inclusive ways to say what needs to be said without misspeciesing any{one/many}.

Thanks for reading this and we hope this finds y'all well.

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I have looked through the app I use (mlem) and the web interface but I can't figure out how to give a link post an image, as when I try to put something into the image section it replaces the link.

So how is it done exactly? Is this some setting, special script or app feature I don't know about? Or have I missed something?

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Version Update? (self.support)
submitted 3 months ago by recursive_recursion to c/support
 
 

Just wondering but when is Beehaw planning to update the instance version?

Since it's currently stuck at 0.18.4 I think this might be causing some issues with updating profile bios

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Is full instance blocking as a user unavaliable because it's not in the version this instance runs or has it been disabled?

If it's the latter could it be enabled? As there are some instances I'd like to block as a user that don't necessarily need to be to blocked from an instance perspective (though maybe they should be).

If it's the former, any idea how long before y'all will update to a version with it in? Thanks!

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Maker Community (self.support)
submitted 5 months ago by Vodulas to c/support
 
 

I don't know if there is enough interest, but is it possible to get a maker community created? Some things like 3d printing don't always quite fit into DIY or Creative.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Grail@aussie.zone to c/support
 
 

c/neurodivergence isn't being moderated at all lately. Three months ago there was the great post from NoOnesLazyInLazyTown@beehaw.org concerning ableism against people with NPD, and the amount of toxicity I saw in that thread was shocking. Some great people pushing back on the ableism and hate there, but I couldn't believe those hateful comments were being left up, or the sheer volume of them.

Yesterday I posted a new article I wrote also concerning NPD, hoping I would get the same kind of positive response I've gotten from Beehaw in the past when talking about neurodiversity. But instead I saw nothing but hate, personal attacks, and vicious toxicity. This isn't the kind of discourse I come to Beehaw to see, and I don't think I'm alone.

Looking at the community history, it looks like the post volume has dramatically reduced since immediately before that first NPD post. I'm not surprised people are avoiding the community, I don't intend to use it anymore either if what I received yesterday is going to be the norm.

The modlog of this community hasn't been touched in 7 months, and the only comment removal visible at all is tagged with the removal reason "stupid comment", which I frankly find quite ironic.

Can we please have some actual moderation on this community? If there is absolutely nobody else who can volunteer their time then I'd even be happy to do it Myself.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by theangriestbird to c/support
 
 

Idk if the admins are aware of this, just putting it out there because I don't think anyone else has posted about it yet.

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submitted 6 months ago by andrewcyber to c/support
 
 

Title, wondering if Beehaw is technically open source? And if so, what license is it under?

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lemmy.ml Tankies (self.support)
submitted 6 months ago by darkphotonstudio to c/support
 
 

There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.

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we discovered this set the other day by olivvybee (Liv Asch), and obviously these are delightfully thematic for our instance. you should be able to find them in our emoji picker as follows. the emoji icon, at least on desktop, is the fourth from left smiley face on comment/post UI:

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welcome to the second-ever Beehaw Community Survey. it's been awhile because of everything going on; we last did one of these with the influx of people last June and we got 1,500 responses that time. we don't expect anywhere near that many this time, but that's fine.

this survey should take about 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:

Beehaw Community Survey #2


the survey is comprised of eight optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and eight questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. the survey will be open for at least three days but no longer than one week. it'll be locally pinned for the duration of that minimum three days, so please mind that. results will also be aggregated and posted on here/the Docs page in a summary like with the last survey. no ETA on that.


this is also a good time to remind everyone that Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, and we will be taking all donations from there going forward. please direct your donations there if you haven't switched from our old Open Collective Foundation page yet!

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Upgarding past 1.8 (self.support)
submitted 8 months ago by Beegzoidberg to c/support
 
 

Hello, I've been receiving this notice from voyager and wanted to hesr your thoughts. I don't understand the tech side of this at all. But, I'm curious if you have plans to update, or if I should find a new client to view beehaw. Thanks!

https://lemmy.world/post/12479493

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Hello folks, this is an impromptu emergency announcement.

In short: Open Collective Foundation, the fiscal host we use for Beehaw, will no longer accept donations starting on March 15, 2024. They will shut down completely at the end of the year, December 31, 2024. This was an extremely sudden decision by them; we were only made aware of it last night through their email to us. The cause given is "Open Collective Foundation’s business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform;" they note that they froze accepting new collectives last year.

This obviously presents a lot of problems for Beehaw. Here are all the relevant dates given to us by Open Collective:

  • Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
  • Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
  • Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024
  • Day they formally dissolve: December 31, 2024

Because Open Collective holds our funds, based on our understanding it seems likely we will not be able to keep our existing funds unless we find a 501(c)(3) organization to be our new fiscal host or become one ourselves by September 30. (EDIT: Or, we just spend it all preemptively.)

Open Collective Foundation's also email writes that:

We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501(c)(3) organization or fiscal sponsor.

and so we'll be contacting them as soon as possible to see if we can arrange a solution with just their help.

But: in the mean time (and in case they can't help us, given the suddenness of this announcement) we need your help to find solutions--and we will probably need them urgently. If you have any help you can provide us, any services you can recommend, or anything that might help us quickly (and as painlessly as possible, given the short notice) transition to another service, that would be greatly appreciated. Fair warning that this will also likely derail the March financial update until we have a clearer picture of what we'll do and if OCF can help us going forward.

Thanks, and hopefully we can resolve this situation without difficulty.

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I don't want any lemmy.nsfw posts on my All tab. And there are so many instances

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by debanqued to c/support
 
 

I posted an apparently off-topic post to !foss@beehaw.org. The moderator removed it from the timeline because discussion about software that should be FOSS was considered irrelevant to FOSS. Perhaps fair enough, but it’s an injustice that people in a discussion were cut off. The thread should continue even if it’s not linked in the community timeline. I received a reply that I could not reply to. What’s the point in blocking a discussion that’s no longer visible from the timeline?

It’s more than just an unwanted behavior because the UI is broken enough to render a dysfunctional reply mechanism. That is, I can click the reply button to a comment in an orphaned thread (via notifications) and the UI serves me with a blank form where I can then waste human time writing a msg, only to find that clicking submit causes it to go to lunch in an endless spinner loop. So time is wasted on the composition then time is wasted wondering what’s wrong with the network. When in fact the reply should simply go through.

(edit) this is similar to this issue. Slight difference though: @jarfil@beehaw.org merely expects to be able to reply to lingering notifications after a mod action. That’s good but I would go further and propose that the thread should still be reachable and functional (just not linked in the timeline where it was problematic).

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This series of single word spam has 1 vote each:

https://beehaw.org/comment/2351412

Yet there are responses to the same comment with many more upvotes. Why don’t the higher valued comments rise above the comments with a score of 1?

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