(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)

Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters!

Let's take some time to look at what we have achieved in the past months, and what is coming up next.

Highlights

  • new membership form now live at join.codeberg.org
  • collaboration to use Forgejo in German schools
  • more than 100.000 projects as of late on Codeberg

Codeberg e.V. has 401 members in total, these are 281 members with active voting rights, 113 supporting members and 7 honorary members.

Forgejo

While insights into the development activity of Forgejo can always be found on their blog, there are some topics worth mentioning here.

First, we are very grateful for the awesome support received by Forgejo contributors recently regarding performance issues. While our filesystem-based problems are resolved, we know dealt with database slowdowns and occasional deadlocks.

Forgejo developers did a great job helping us identify and improve slow queries and add database indices where they were useful. One example: We cut down the time to delete a spam user (see below) from up to a minute down to one second in most cases, with some work in worst-cases remaining.

Further, there is a new pilot project investigating to use Forgejo in German schools. We are proud to support this mission, as education is an explicit goal as per our bylaws. You can read more about it here: forgejo/discussions#71. If you are interested to help with this specific project, please get in touch with us.

Last but not least, we are calling for help: If you are a developer interested to work on Forgejo (Backend (Go), Frontend, UI/UX, User Research and more), please get in touch with us.

There are a multitude of diverse tasks, from deep dive into database and performance tweaks, federation and forge compatibility, crazy unsolved bugs to current works on improving overall user experience and conducting user research.

If you are a German citizen or can create compatible invoices (e.g. as a freelancer), we might even be able to provide some financial compensation for your free time. Please reach out so we can discuss potential options.

Spam and Abuse

During the past months, we have seen a heavy increase of spam on Codeberg. While we have a steady amount of accounts that advertize dubious services via their profile description, the spam got much more annoying for other platform users recently. We have seen spammers create thousands of issues, also in existing open source projects.

With immediate action and a lot of work, we were able to cut down the amount of spam drastically. To give you an idea: During our largest scan for abusive content, we removed 15% of all issues on Codeberg within a few days, because they were spams.

We are working to improve the tooling around this. If you come along spam on Codeberg, you can mention "@moderation" in a comment, until proper flagging options (work in progress) are implemented.

Next to spam, we have also removed some warez / piracy repositories with extreme traffic or storage demand.

We are considering to change our signup flow, please check out and give your feedback in Codeberg/Community#1329.

Community & Initiatives

Several contributors have teamed up and created valuable contributions. Thank you!

The highlight: The long-awaited update of our membership registration form went live in October. If your friends are not yet members of Codeberg e.V. yet, consider pointing them at join.codeberg.org now.

We hope that the new form is both more visually appealing as well as clearer regarding membership and payment options.

There is also news from the recently-formed code search team (@fourstepper and @yoctozepto) who have done some initial discovery of what is available in terms of repository search for Forgejo out of the box, as well as what could fit Codeberg best.

Keeping performance and deployment strategies in mind, the bleve code indexer is likely not usable for Codeberg, and they are now looking into OpenSearch and Hound - evaluating these options for Codeberg simultaneously.

They also created some tooling for generating sample data and setting up some preliminary development environment. To track the progress, you can follow the code-search repository and say hi in the codeberg-code-search:matrix.org channel Matrix channel. We are looking forward to conducting first production tests next year.

Last but not least, we want to thank @pat-s for becoming a second maintainer of our Woodpecker instance.

Community Spotlight: New to Codeberg

We are happy to see some interesting projects have recently moved to Codeberg. For a start, the libre game FreeRCT, which allows you to operate a fun park and build your unique roller coaster in the spirit of the RollerCoaster Tycoon games is now developed on Codeberg.

Recent development work includes a working scenario system, which makes the gameplay more interesting. Will you manage to reach the goals of your park in time?

If you need a day off, this game is definitely worth a try.

Do you like playing with new programming languages? What comes next? Consider giving Zig a try by solving the Ziglings exercises. Zig is a simple programming language for building robust and maintainable software. The Ziglings project makes learning easier and funnier by providing a set of tasks that cover the core concepts of Zig. And the good thing: You don't need to be an expert in C to get started.

You might know or use inxi to get information about the Linux or BSD system you are running on. And if you want to update inxi now, you can even get it from Codeberg. By the way, inxi is also installed on our server systems. In the future, we might just clone it locally …

Thank you all for your awesome contributions to Free/Libre software. It is a pleasure for us to provide you with the necessary infrastructure.

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https://codeberg.org
Codeberg e.V. – Arminiusstraße 2 - 4 – 10551 Berlin – Germany
Registered at registration court Amtsgericht Charlottenburg VR36929.