Indymedia linksunten has evolved into the most important radical website in the German-speaking countries in the seven and a half years of its existence since February 2009. Each day, thousands of activists visit the website to inform themselves about every aspect of antagonistic movements and publish their stories. Whether occupations, attacks, debates or labour disputes are concerned – little rebellious action takes place here and now that you can't find on linksunten.
Stop Pegida – Nationalism is no Alternative
Recently, loads of reports, outings and leaks could be found against the increasing right-wing movement. This right-wing surge shows itself openly in Pegida marches, election successes of the rightwing party AfD and burning refugee homes. Whoever wants to inform themself about the new and old fascists is well advised to read Indymedia linksunten.
The Leaks regarding the AfD party convention in Stuttgart and the responsibility claims about the attacks on party officials were certainly not an undisputed issue within the Indymedia network – and we are still discussing our position towards this – the actions no matter made the right-wingers hate Indymedia linksunten even more. The helpless rage of the fascists shows in hundreds of censored comments every day that lack even the least bit of civil facade - and in continuous digital attacks targeted towards our website that aim to render it unavailable (DDoS).
“Your machine is earning its access to the requested content“
The friendly anti DDoS network Deflect was forced by these attacks to install a JavaScript splash screen. We recognize that JavaScrip could be abused if used incorrectly. But since even the experienced Deflect admins analyzed the DDoS attacks as being quite massive we had no other choice. Using logs and IP based defence mechanisms would be an alternative, but honestly: we really don't want to know who published all these beautiful claims of responsibility.
We are planning to renew the tech behind Indymedia linksunten. We're setting up the new server using Ansible and are thus developing on a copy of the future live site. In the future, we'll use Nginx as webserver instead of Apache and MariaDB as database server instead of MySQL. Our search engine will continue to use Apache Solr and for our operating system we trust the Debian maintainers.
Proudly found elsewhere: Drupal 8
The main change will be Drupal 8, the most current version of our Content Management Systems. This version uses standard PHP tools such as the object oriented MVC framework Symfony 2 and the packet manager Composer. This is a fundamental difference to the former versions of Drupal and thus we have to rebuild our website from scratch.
While doing this we're going to use tests to check all components of our future platform automatically. The Drupal PHP code will be tested using PHPUnit, the Python based Ansible scripts will be tested using white box tests using the Ruby test framework RSpec and Serverspec gem. The whole platform will be tested using black box tests with RSpec and Infratester gem. Of course, these server monitoring and test platforms need time and energy, but in the long run will bring stability and flexibility.
Money doesn’t talk, it swears
Unfortunately, the number of Indymedia linksunten users doesn't reflect in the number of those who support us financially – a big thank you to those who did and still do so! We know that it's far from easy to send us money, but you'll guess why.
However, even a non-commercial project like linksunten needs money to keep the servers running. We can't do both the moderation work – which needs several hours of work every day – and at the same time organise money for the servers. So please go ahead and donate to Tachanka!, to Mayfirst, to our new Bitcoin adress 1JHVUUBqM2Fdr1gzizaPKEXY9GjgSgK1XS or contact us to find another way. Please think about how much you use linksunten and how your group or collective could send a little money regularly or organize a solidarity gig event – so that one can continue to read on linksunten: “Last night we have...“
The social revolution is and will be the only perspective!
Indymedia linksunten
Communiqué from 18.09.2016