New Address System in v1.5.7

Updates and announcements.
Locked
User avatar
Peter
Site Admin
Posts: 2281
Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2016 8:51 am
Contact:

New Address System in v1.5.7

Post by Peter »

Hi all,

there is an important change to be aware of in 1.5.7. JoinFS addresses will be working in a new way. The format of the address will remain the same, for example, '12345 67890', but it will now work as follows:

Old Address System (before v1.5.7)
  • Was based on your external IP address. So if your IP address changed, which in some cases was quite frequent, then your JoinFS address changed as well. This made it difficult to keep track of your favourite connections.
  • For a lot of people, if they wanted to create a session or a hub they needed to configure their router to forward the port, which was somewhat of an inconvenience, especially for those new to JoinFS.
New Address System (v1.5.7)
  • Now based on the machine that JoinFS is running on. The address will remain static and never change unless you clear the JoinFS registry settings. If your IP address changes then you will still have the same JoinFS address, making it much easier to manage your frequent connections.
  • For most people there should be no need to configure port forwarding in the router settings. JoinFS will manage the initial connections behind the scenes. All you need to do is enter the other person's address, click join and that's it.
As a result of these changes the 'Bookmarks' will now be known as 'Friends' since it is now easier to store the permanent address of another user. There is a new 'Friend' column in the user list of the session view, where you can easily choose new friends.

This change also means that your current friends (bookmarks) will no longer be valid, so you will need to find out the new v1.5.7 address for each friend and edit them in the list.

You can still connect to hubs in the hub list that are still using an old version. But when sharing your new JoinFS address just make sure the other people are also on at least version 1.5.7.

[UPDATE 22/11/20]
This change will not affect current connections using the DNS name, IP address or port number. All that will still work as normal.

Please let me know if you have any queries about this change.

Peter
Locked