squidgestatus

We've had a huge influx of people to SquidgeWorld in the last week or so, and it seems to come down to an incident at AO3 with underage fics.  This email is to respond to the half a dozen emails/trouble tickets that we've gotten asking us to clarify our stance on the issue.  Even though it's explicitly stated in the SqWA Posting Help section, we're pointing it out here, word-for-word.

Point 1 - Use of the Underage tag: The SquidgeWorld Archive does allow Underage fanworks to be added to the archive.
Point 2 - Use of the Underage tag with respect to fic ratings: Any fic that features the Underage tag and where the rating is Mature or Explicit, that fic must be locked to Archive users only. No exceptions.
Point 3 - Use of RPF tag: The SquidgeWorld Archives does allow Real People Fiction - RPF - to be added to the archive.
Point 4 - Underage/RPF tags on the same fic: If a user adds an Underage fic that is about RPF - Real Person Fiction - that fic must be locked to Archive users only. No exceptions.  NOTE: This rule is new, added in response to this very situation.

While some people may not agree, this is our stance.  We refuse to become gatekeepers of those who use the site; we will never tell you what you can and cannot post to the archive.  However, we want to make sure that people who use the archive and do not want to see those works are not inadvertently exposed to them.  This is why we have our locking policy in place.  If it's in the archive and meets the above points, locking must be completed appropriately.  And if it is not—and a recent quick check showed that people are not always respecting this rule—the locking will be done for you by the admins.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them.  But if you just want to sit back behind an anonymous keyboard and call us names, that's fine. We just don't need to know about it; don't send us a note to let us know you're calling us an asshole somewhere on the Interwebs. People already do this, and it's tiring.

So we had an equipment failure for The SquidgeWorld Archive that makes the current machine unusable.  We're weighing options, but there will be no update available for the immediate future.  We will be back up, but it's going to depend on a few things.  First of all, we just ordered the necessary equipment as a backup, but we're going to attempt to move the "innards" of the server to a new machine that we have already on hand.

It will probably be Sunday before the server is back up and running again, though we cannot guarantee this.

The good thing is, with our judicious backup policy, we're sure no data is lost.  Indeed, the drives are working just fine.  We just now need to solve a few technical issues before we can come back.

If you're part of SquidgeWorld Archive, you may notice that the site will be down briefly throughout the day - today, October 26th, 2025.  This is because we are going to be adding a few things here and there to add links to Squidge.org's fandom offerings in the Community links/page, as well as additional clarification information for commenting.  The Community links additions will link to some of our pages on Dreamwidth where you can get additional information about Squidge and learn about challenges that are currently happening, and the additional information for posting comments is around discouraging commission spammers from posting.

As always, if you've got questions, don't hesitate to contact us!

First and foremost, while Squidge.org hosts the Jinjurly Podfic Archive, we do not control the domain name.  The domain name is still maintained by the original owner.  Having said that, the Jinjurly archive domain name expired - and all we can do is ask the current domain holder to renew it for us.  So we're waiting for that.  But, in the event this type of things happened, we preemptively registered the domain name AudioFicArchive.org for us to use.  So if you are currently trying to gain access to the Jinjurly Podfic Archive, please use this domain name for the time being:

https://audioficarchive.org 

Secondly, due to an influx of spam lately, I've made some changes to the spamassassin configuration.  There should be no negative side effects to this, so people using Squidge.org email should see a reduction in spam.  But if you notice anything odd - like you know you're missing email - then please let us know.  You can comment here or open a support ticket by clicking here.

This morning the system seemed to have barfed and took image hosting down along with everything else it was serving to the web.  I've got things back up at the moment, but haven't finished checking all hosted sites to make sure everything is good.  It'll be back to normal asap.

Just to keep everyone in touch with what's going on with our yearly fundraiser, we're getting close!  Our yearly goal is to raise at least $2,000 so that we can get through the next year, and as of 3pm Pacific Time today, we've raised $1,792.16 - almost 90% of our goal!

If you can help get us to our goal, or just need more information about the fundraiser, including the cool design on either a sticker or t-shirt you get for donating, you can click here for all the details.  And if you're so inclined, you can simply use PayPal to send a donation to [email protected].

Thank you for being part of our little space on the Internet!

All on-premises Squidge services (squidge.org, Image Hosting, SquidgeWorld, Classic Squidge, IRC) went down Thursday night at approximately 6pm Pacific time due to network issues.  We seem to be mostly up this morning, with the exception of Classic Squidge which only hosts a very small number of websites that depend on a very insecure, outdated version of PHP.  That said, there could still be burps here and there.  If you have questions, please let us know.  Thanks!

We had some issues overnight, which led to our database server failing.  Not sure why it didn't auto-recover like it should have and we will investigate.  Meanwhile, all services are back up (though SquidgeWorld is going through Sunday maintenance as I type this).  If after all services are back up you notice anything odd, please let us know.

 

We went down for approximately 45 minutes, apparently due to an ISP issue.  Both our fiber lines seemed to be down simultaneously, which meant there was something in the ISP's switching office that barfed and they had to bring things back up.  Nothing within Squidge.org itself went down, but all services except for FenRecs.com seemed to be affected.

Please let us know if you have questions or see anything wonky by clicking here to submit a helpdesk ticket.

Image hosting (https://images.squidge.org) is currently down. It will be up as soon as we're able to.  Please be aware that if this takes longer than expected, image hosting will become password-protected and unavailable until released.