New appliance - Openfire

[JedMeister]

We deprecated our eJabberd appliance in v14.0. It was our only XMPP chat server. I think that it'd be a good idea to provide one again.

Doing a bit of googling, it seems that Openfire(on GH) (arguably) gets the most love so I suggest we run with that.

FWIW, they provide a .deb via their GH release page.

[codecleric]

Question! Why was the eJabberD appliance deprecated? It's still being actively maintained and new features are being added.

[JedMeister]

@codecleric - Apologies on such a slow response. TBH, I forget now. But IIRC it was because we used Speeqe as a web front end and that died (and wasn't compatible). I did look at other potential front ends but there weren't any good ones that I could find at the time that were an adequate replacement.

Having said that, you are right. So perhaps we should relook at that. And even if there isn't a nice web based admin front end, we could still build an appliance. FWIW, that's what we did with Mumble and even though there isn't a nice web management front end, it still works and people still get value from it.

So perhaps we'll do that?!

[codecleric]

I think that would be an excellent idea. Ejabberd has it's own basic web admin tool, but it's more informational besides adding users.

[JedMeister]

@codecleric - I've opened a new issue to track that: #1669