Merry Christmas and happy uploading!

Santa's Little Helpers have been working hard to bring you the 3.0 release of Convos, but it's all done and ready to come down a chimney where you live.

This is probably my favorite release so far. "Why?", you might ask. Well, the reason is simple: You can now upload photos (or any file you like) directly using Convos, without the hassle of going through a third party service.

File sharing

Not using a third party service is very important, since Convos is about privacy. You run your own instance. You're in charge of the logs and data, so sharing a file should be no different. Did you upload the wrong file? No problem - just delete it, and it will be gone forever.

Uploading a file can be done in two ways:

Drag and drop the file into the conversation. Click on the new "upload" icon, next to the "send" icon in the message input.

Either will result in a link being inserted into the message input field. Clicking on send afterwards will share the file with the person/people in the conversation. The link is not password protected, so non-convos users can see it as well.

Uploading text files will create a paste, just like when you insert a long message or many lines into the message input field.

Uploading an image will result in a clickable thumbnail.

The maximum upload size is 40MB by default. The config page has details on how to change this value

A codebase full of promises

Convos jumped directly from 2.0 to 3.0, because this release also features some breaking changes in the Perl codebase: The non-blocking API is now powered by promises, instead of the callback based API. This makes the codebase a lot smaller and easier to work with. The PR actually saved about 100 lines of code, while at the same time getting rid of the Mojo::IRC dependency.

Please see #423 for all the major changes. There were some bugfixes after that PR was merged as well, but most of the changes are there.

Snap build

I'm very happy to see that we are finally up to date in the Snap store! Big thanks to Adam Stokes for fixing the config file and explaining how to set up automatic builds.

Moving onwards

Hopefully we'll see 3.01 (and not another major release) in January, with the following changes:

#380 - Add nickserv certfp authentication

#422 - Multi-language User Interface

#425 - Get rid of Unicode::UTF8 as dependency

#426 - As a user, I would like to manage my uploaded files

I don't know exactly how to solve #380 and #425 though, so any input is more than welcome!

Got something else that you think should be prioritized? Come talk to us in #convos at chat.freenode.net or use the issue tracker.