💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › help captured on 2024-07-09 at 00:42:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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This is a community-oriented capsule that provides Gemini users discussion forums, microblogging facilities, and issue trackers with Git repository integration. You only need a Gemini client to participate.
If you are new to Gemini, this is one place where you can start your journey. This capsule does not and is not meant to represent the totality of Geminispace: there are many capsules out there operated by many people, and perhaps one day you will set up one as well.
Even if you already have a capsule of your own, this site can be a common meeting place where you are able to discuss topics with your fellow Geminauts and collaborate on Gemini-related projects. Since geminispace.org can be accessed with any full-featured Gemini client, everyone is on a level playing field regardless of their preferred device or operating system.
bbs.geminispace.org is administered by @skyjake (alias: @admin).
Sign up for a new account here.
Alternatively, you can always navigate to the capsule front page and activate a client certificate manually. In this case, please check that the certificate is activated for the entire domain:
After registering your account, you should visit Settings to configure a few things:
You can select an Emoji avatar, describe who you are, and include one featured link that appears at the top of your "u/" page.
Otherwise, all displayed times are shown in UTC. Your time zone is not displayed publicly for privacy reasons.
See the "Account Recovery" section for more details.
Set an email address for notifications.
Don't forget to check out the "Posting and Commenting" section for details about making posts. The main points you should know is that Gemtext formatting is fully supported and comments can be drafted, too.
Now the new certificate is linked to your account in addition to any existing certificates you had previously. You can remove old/expired certificates as long as at least one certificate remains linked to your account.
Posts and comments are composed of "segments". There can be any number of segments, and the order of existing segments can be freely changed in the composer. There are four types of segments:
When viewing the post page, each of these segments are visible in their entirety. In various other places, a shortened "feed preview" is shown instead. The composer shows a preview of both the shortened version and the full page contents before you can publish the post.
When making a new post, what you enter in the "New post" prompt becomes the body text of the post and the title will be left blank. You can then edit the post to add a title, if necessary. However, if you begin the text entered into the prompt with a level 1 heading (#), that first line will be extracted and used as the post title. In issue tracker subspaces, the first line is always used as the issue title.
You can use an "@username" mention to notify another user about your post or comment. Multiple users can be notified in the same message. Usernames are case-insensitive, so you don't have to capitalize the @-mention exactly like the user's name is capitalized.
While Bubble does not support private/direct messages, you can make a post in your "u/" subspace, flag it as omitted from All Posts and feeds, and mention one or more users who you wish to communicate with. This way the conversation at least does not clutter the front page or subspace feeds.
In an issue tracker, you can refer to other issues by their ID number, for instance "#123". A link to the mentioned issue appears automatically, and a cross reference will also appear in the mentioned issue's comment history.
If an issue tracker is linked with a Git repository, you can also refer to individual Git commits by their SHA hash simply by writing out (the beginning of) the hash.
Because Gemini limits the amount of data per request to 1024 bytes, it is unsuitable for uploading files to the server. Therefore, Bubble supports a protocol called Titan for uploading files.
The Titan protocol is an add-on for Gemini clients and servers. It is used to upload data to servers, making external tools like ftp or other protocols like the web unnecessary.
In practice, you need Gemini client that supports Titan uploads (e.g., Lagrange), or a standalone Titan upload tool:
In the "New post" and "Comment" prompts, there are special commands available:
In the "Edit text" prompts of the draft composer:
Titan uploads always deal with the actual contents of the post/segments, so special commands are not available when using Titan.
When editing segments in the draft composer, you may sometimes accidentally submit the input and overwrite the contents, losing some text that you meant to keep in there. While Bubble does not currently keep a history of past edited versions, your client may be able to help you. If you navigate backwards, the old contents of the segment may be found in a cached copy of the page.
In addition to the usual @-mentions, comments and likes, you can be notified about new posts in a thread you were part of, and you can follow users, subspaces, and individual posts to be notified of new comments and/or posts in/by them. There are also notifications for new polls and issues that have been closed. Each of these notification types can be individually enabled or disabled.
Check out the list of options in Settings.
When clicking on a notification in Dashboard or elsewhere, it is automatically hidden. However, the notification "/notif/" links remain valid for up to one week, during which you can access a particular notification multiple times.
Past notifications can be viewed in the Notification History.
Bubble supports email notifications to keep you informed about activity in a timely fashion. Enabling this is optional, but it can be argued that an integral part of a communication tool is proactively keeping people in the loop about noteworthy events.
The emailing frequency is user-configurable, so you can choose how often emails about unseen notifications are sent. Furthermore, to prevent emails from being sent at inconvenient times, you can set an exclusion range. For example, a reasonable night hour range could be "23-05" (inclusive; the first emails would start arriving at 6 in the morning).
Feed entries sometimes have a 🔔 icon. This means at least one of your unread notifications is about that post. When viewing such a post, the relevant notifications are listed right there under Actions, so you check them off and/or clear them more conveniently.
You may notice that some users have labels that appears after their name, for example "[admin]". These are called "flairs". They let you personalize your appearance in specific subspaces or site-wide, acting as a sort of "body language" that is otherwise missing in a text-based medium. You can configure your flairs in Settings:
Flairs can be used for various purposes:
The moderator of a subspace can add and remove subspace flairs on a user. Moderators may ensure that flairs are used in the appropriate manner for a particular subspace. The administrator can assign flairs that regular users are unable to edit or remove.
The front page's feed can be switched between "All Posts" and "Followed" in your Settings.
Sorting by 🔥 Hotness orders the posts based on how much time has passed since the latest comment in the discussion thread and how many different people have commented. The actual number of comments has no influence. The idea is to keep active discussion threads near the top of the feed.
The front page feed, subspaces, user feeds, and issue trackers can all be filtered based on tags applied on posts.
User subspaces ("u/" prefix) are intended for personal posts. Each individual post can be either included in or omitted from Gemini/Atom feeds using the toggles in the composer. In Settings, you can set which mode is the default. By omitting a post from Gemini/Atom feeds, it effectively becomes a microblog post that only appears in Tinylogs and on Bubble itself. This way, you can publish your "u/" Gemini/Atom feed as a gemlog that contains longer-form posts, while still being able to have short-form posts, too.
You can also use tag filtering to have more fine-grained control over feeds. You are free to tag your posts however you like.
In your user profile, you can configure the title of your "u/" feed.
By default, your username is the feed title.
The post title that is set in the composer will be used as-is in Gemini/Atom feeds. If the title is missing, a truncated version of the post contents are used instead.
A convenient action link is provided for submitting your "u/" Gemini feed and your individual posts to the Antenna aggregator. Antenna submission does not happen automatically so you retain control of when and if the submission is done.
The Atom feed generated by Bubble contains the full contents of each post as HTML. Any comments about the post are not included.
The formatting of posts is altered when viewing them via Tinylog: all headings are converted to level 3.
You can follow and mute posts, subspaces, and users to customize their visibility and notifications about them. In Settings, you can choose whether the front page feed shows all posts — except mutes ones — or just posts from followed subspaces and users.
Follows are entirely private in Bubble: only you see what you follow, and there are no counters or statistics about them visible anywhere. Followers do not affect the "hotness" sorting order, either.
When you vote in a poll, the post is automatically marked as followed so you will be notified of discussion related to it even though you haven't commented on the poll yourself.
Muting is private, too. No one can see what you have muted, or who has muted them. You can mute individual posts, entire subspaces, and all posts, comments by a particular user. Muting generally prevents notifications from being received regarding the target of the mute.
Every subspace must have at least one moderator assigned to it, or otherwise the subspace is locked into read-only mode.
Moderators are able to lock and unlock comment threads, delete posts and comments, and edit titles of posts. They cannot edit the contents of posts, though.
Posts can be moved between subspaces. Moderators can move any post in their subspace to another subspace, and post authors can always move their own posts elsewhere. Moving a post does not break URLs because post IDs are unique, and a URL that uses the old subspace name will be redirected to the new location. However, issue tracker posts cannot be moved due to per-subspace issue ID numbering.
A moderator of a subspace can assign any other user as an additional moderator of the subspace. Each moderator has the same access rights, regardless of who originally created the subspace.
Moderators can add and remove flairs on users that apply to the moderated subspace. Moderators have the ability to add the "Note from moderator" flairs that may relate to moderation actions that occur as a response to rule breaking, for example.
Individual subspaces can be used for project issue tracking instead of regular posting. Issue trackers differ from regular subspaces in that each post will be assigned a unique ID number, and each issue has an open/closed status. One can also reference issues in the same tracker just by writing the ID number preceded by a hash. This automatically creates a bidirectional cross reference.
Also see #123.
Subspace moderators can enable or disable issue tracking mode in an empty subspace.
Bubble instance administrators are able to attach a Git repository to an issue tracker. This causes a bare clone of the repository to be fetched and periodically updated. Git commits that reference issues in their log messages will automatically appear in the relevant issue's discussion history, and when Git commit hashes are detected in issues and issue tracker comments, links to the commits are automatically displayed.
Use of tags is recommended in issue trackers, for example to make a distinction between features and bugs. The list of issues can be filtered based on tags for easier navigation.
Occasionally people lose their client certificates and thus also lose access to their Bubble account. Contacting the administrator is fine for account recovery but it also has some significant drawbacks. For example, the administrator may not be able to verify that the account actually belongs to you. To facilitate account recovery, there is an automated certificate recovery feature.
You can go to your account settings and set a Recovery URL.
Then, when disaster has struck and you've lost your registered certificates, you can do the following:
If you have a place where you can publish files on Gemini, such as your own capsule, it is recommended to always have the recovery URL configured. It's a good idea to use a directory and/or file name that doesn't currently exist and is unlikely to be easily guessed. In any case, this URL should only point to an existing file while you are recovering your account. You probably don't want to keep your client certificate published otherwise.
An important use case for Bubble is providing individuals and small groups of people a personal publishing platform or a private space. For this purpose, user registration can be closed, and there are admin actions to create new users, generate random passwords, and revoke certificates.
The `frontpage` configuration option defines a static Gemtext page that is shown to unregistered visitors. This page is the only thing unregistered visitors are able to see.
The `user.subspaces` configuration option controls whether users can create new subspaces, in case the admin wants the subspaces to remain a fixed set of categories, for example.