July and August 2026: a quiet summer, a hardware run, and a plain-English pass

July was quiet, and we'd rather say so than pad it out. August meant a trip to the UK to collect an SGI Challenge S and an Indy, and a close read of everything the site says: the copy rewritten in plain English, contradictions between pages fixed, and the homepage rebuilt around the problem that actually brings people here.

Written up afterwards

Written in September 2026 from our session notes and commit history, and dated to the end of the period it covers.

July

One change to the platform repository all month. The network ran; the admin tooling got a small access-control fix. That's it.

August

The hardware run. August and September included a trip to the UK to collect two machines in person: an SGI Challenge S and an SGI Indy. The Challenge S is now in the bTen room and taking member logins; see September. The Indy is still to come.

11 Aug: mail server updated. The mail platform went to its latest release, which fixed a known vulnerability in its web server and updated spam filtering. Backups, admin access and outbound delivery were checked afterwards. Two minutes of interruption.

28 Aug: the homepage leads with CGNAT. People arrive because their machine is stuck behind carrier-grade NAT and they want a real public address without port forwarding. The homepage now says that first, with an animated map (your box, the NAT wall, the tunnel, the mesh, the internet) that lights up hubs from live status data.

28 Aug: tiers you earn, not buy. The sponsor page became Account Tiers. Plus and Pro are described as what you get through actually using and sharing on the network, not something you purchase.

28 Aug: a plain-English pass. The homepage, wiki, signup and account emails were rewritten to read like a person wrote them. Along the way we fixed places where pages contradicted each other on which hubs are live, what's free and how account review works.

28 Aug: the signup path, tested for real. A full real-world run through signup, email verification and delivery. It all worked, deliverability scored well, and one small email-authentication mismatch was noted for tidying. The finding that mattered: signup isn't the bottleneck, being found is.

Also: the tiers page copy cleaned up so the names match what the dashboard calls them.

By the numbers

1 change to the platform repository in July, 26 in August.