squidgestatus

Something crashed at the ISP and the entire network is down. No current ETA. 

Apparently our ISP, Ziply Fiber, is having intermittent outages in the Pacific Northwest.  We had a 45 minute downtime earlier, and a 15 minute downtime just now.  If you can't access any Squidge.org services with the exception of FenRecs.com (which is remote hosted) then please wait a bit and then retry.  Sorry, but this seems to be out of our control.

As always, you can open a trouble ticket by clicking here if you see something amiss.

We attempted an upgrade (a one-click, no mess upgrade which bombed) to get around a defect, but it bombed last night and no amount of pleading and prodding would get it to work. So this morning we're live on the older version of our image hosting software and things are back up.  If you see issues, please let us know.

About an hour ago we went down for about 20 minutes, but things should be up and running smoothly now.  We had a power issue (electrician is testing some things) so we had to flip the breaker.  And while most items are protected via battery backup, one of our systems blurped and didn't automatically come back up.  We're good to go now, though.  But if you see any issues, don't hesitate to contact us.  Thanks!

We've come up with a theme for our annual Summer fundraiser, but in order to bring our thoughts to fruition, we need someone who has some illustration experience. What we're looking for is a cartoonish-like cabin at night (here's a Shutterstock picture for reference).  And while this is for fundraising, we can't pay all that much.  But if you've got experience and would like to help out, please reach out to us - either here or you can reach me at [email protected]

Thank you - and keep on Squidge'n!

Squidge.org is proud to bring you FenRecs.com - a new site that's designed to share fanfiction and other fanworks recommendations, as well as places for community discussion, from writing advice to beta requests to fandom and pairing recommendations.  The site uses open-source software called Lemmy, and it is designed to be much like Reddit.  If you don't know what Reddit is, it's a website that allows people to have different communities (subreddits) where they share things - from pictures to news to stories.

For privacy reasons, you won't be able to access FenRecs.com unless you have an account.  This seems to be the best way to keep people's privacy requests fulfilled.  The site allows you to block other accounts, but the one thing it does not have (at least at the moment) is tags.  So you cannot search for or add tags to posts, nor can you block tags.  We'll be continuing to research and see if we can add this in the future.  Additionally, there is the ability to have downvotes for posts, but it is disabled at the current time.  If and when the site rollout goes smoothly, downvotes may be rolled out as well.

If you are familiar with Reddit, then FenRecs.com will be second nature to you.  You'll find Fic Recs and other discussions that you can upvote.  A post with lots of upvotes will mean to the casual visitor that this is a fic that many people like.  A post with fewer upvotes doesn't mean the work is any less valuable than a higher upvoted fic.  It just means that not enough people have red it to recommend it.

User registration is going to be fully open from 10am Pacific Time until 4pm Pacific Time January 2nd, 2025 - just a six hour period.  We're doing this because we do need an influx of people to come in, poke around, create some communities, and add in some fic recs and/or other discussions.  After 4pm Pacific Time 1/2/25, registration will still be open; however registration will need to be approved by admins.

So head over to FenRecs.com and show fen some love with discussion and recs!

Questions?  You can leave a message here, or drop us a support request.

Like just about every other non-profit out there - and quite a few for-profit corporations that are trying to hijack Giving Tuesday into a capitlistic way of selling more junk - we're here to tell you that it's Giving Tuesday. Today is supposed to be about supporting non-profits that make a difference in your life.

We're just one non-profit organization in an ocean of other organizations asking for support. And if you could, that would definitely help us out. So if you have a buck or two, please consider donating this Giving Tuesday to us by clicking here, or if you're logged into your PayPal account, you can simply send a donation to [email protected]

Thank you for considering Squidge.org this Giving Tuesday!

Please note that due to an influx of bad agents, signups for Squidge Images are temporarily disabled.

Yeah, I wish we didn't have to do it, either.  But because of people not in fandom who are trying to use anonymous hosting for non-fandom things like rape/snuff images and for-sale/commercial listings, we've shut down signups.  The only way to get an account at the moment is to submit a ticket to us, asking for an account at Squidge Images.

Thanks for understanding.

By now, many of you have heard what's going on over at The Internet Archive.  But if you haven't, you can read up on the attack here.  Our hearts go out to them, as well as those podficcers who choose to archive their works at The Archive.

If you are a podficcer and you've lost your podfic files, Squidge.org is here to help.  Here's a bit of information for the different populations of podficcers:

• Podfic Listener:  If you're a listener and there are podfics out there that you can no longer access, please contact the podficcer and let them know about The Jinjurly Audiofic Archive.  There are many archivists here that can help them relocate their works.  Unfortunately if you're just partaking in podfics that have disappeared because of the hack, there's not much that we can do with out the podficcer's permission.  Additionally, said podficcers probably have entries around the Internet announcing their works.  It would be up to them to update their Dreamwidth, LJ, Tumblr, AO3, SqWA, etc. entries with the new information.


• Podficcers who have one or two podfics they would like to relocate:  The best idea we have is that you can fill out the form located here (link).  This form will document everything about your podfic, and gives us enough information so that we can get it entered into the Jinjurly file hosting side of things.


• Podficcers who have a treasure trove of podfics to archive: I hope you like spreadsheets, because here you go (link)!  If you would be so kind as to save your own copy, fill out this spreadsheet, and then alert us at [email protected] of where you saved your spreadsheet.  Then we can start the process of archiving your works.

I'd also like to take this time to remind everyone that we are still missing a few hundred podfics from our original archive rebuild effort.  Take a gander at this spreadsheet and see if you have any of these missing files.  If you do, please ping us!

And as always, if you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask by either responding to this post, or by opening a helpdesk ticket here.

Though it was unknown to us until now, email support tickets were being delivered to our Helpdesk system Freescout, and we were acting on them.  However, due to an internal configuration issue (that was hidden to us until this morning) emails were not going OUT.  So if you get an email about a ticket that was from one day to a couple of months ago, that is why.

Things are up and running now.  If you need to contact us, fill out a support request by clicking here.