Altme down - September 2026

Hello, I'm using altme at work since i started my company in 2010, and i like it for many reasons, and probably also because of a certain nostalgia :) It's still run on windows 11 and what i like the most is it's ... "compactness". There are a few bugs like the broken links when you paste a link or other details, but in overall i get used to it and my few colleagues too (we are 7, located in Luxembourg / EU) But ... this sunday evening (or saturday) it went down :(. I was still using it the friday (4/9/2026). We are hosting our world (on a little unix VM), but i do not know exactly how altme is coded, just that it's not possible to have it 100% self hosted, it requires a lookup to, i suppose, a dedicated central server, which also conserve all the conversations / data. As an alternative, we are using since 2 days the chat integrated in our Synology. It's a nice one we 100% host and control (on that point, it's better than altme), and they released a win32 application which is, from my point of view, mandatory (i do not like web-based tools, even less if it's a chat application) I wonder how many people/communities were still using altme at this moment ? All i can say is that i'm embarrassed and would like to continue to use it. I'm even ready to host it (ie: the central server), i suppose it would not require a big server, but i would need help, or better say, i would need someone who would be able to perform the migration (i would furnish the server and give access to it). But i wonder if this would be easily possible without touching the code of altme ? Isn't the IP address hardcoded into the altme client (and other network parameters) ? I know this forum is dedicated to Rebol, so, some words about as i have a small story to share about : in the past (around 2014/2015), as i had (and still have) a very talented developer in my team, i asked him to play with rebol. He liked it so much that he naturally started to develop a development framework for it (Rebol), but i asked him to stop as i did not see any future for it. Just wanted to inform about here to say that he enjoyed the language, which was to him very unusual. I'm also, from my studies, a developer, but did not write much code since ages (i only write big scripts on windows (in fact, production application we still sell) on the old "kix" or "kix32" for those who know about, the ancestor of powershell) If anyone here has a clue about the future of altme, or ... i don't know, if it's possible to self-host it. Best option would be to get the source code of altme and remove any external lookup, allowing to 100% host under one isolated network its own altme world, but i suspect this would be a big task, and not sure if someone would be in measure to find the source code of this application. I wonder if i have to say "RIP" to altme or not ? That's all, thanks ! Alex

Good news ! I wrote a mail to Carl about altme and he answered & solved the problem, the domain altme.com was expired. After a couple of hours the server was back again. In my email, i asked about the source code of altme, if he could release it, and here's the second good news, I copy what he answered about : " Also, I very much would like to release the AltME source code. It’s a fantastic piece of code - a great example of what Rebol can do in a very small footprint. I wrote it when I was at my peak in Rebol coding. BTW, one reason I did not release the code was that someone might be able to crack or attack the central server which essentially just looks up IP addresses for worlds, but also checks if the AltME client needs to be updated. Of course, there have been no updates for a long time. I’ll release the code on a public system like GitHub so anyone can then access it and fork it or whatever. " As he told me i can relay what he wrote me back, so do I here. On of my colleague played with Rebol a couple of years before. If Carl well release the source of altme, i'll maybe ask him to have a look at it. There are minor bug to correct and some little things could be improved, but one of the main update i would like to see is to have it 100% self-hostable. At least, adding an encryption layer on top of it would be ideal. Cheers to all

Thank you for that update!

That’s great news! There was an attempt some time ago to create an open‑source AltME — https://github.com/greggirwin/OpenME.

Alex, It's likely a fairly trivial project now, to implement an entirely new reverse-engineered replacement from scratch, stand up new server infrastructure, install, migrate data and users, add any new required features, and provide a more malleable platform for future needs.

That said, separate from putting together a replacement application, I'd certainly be excited to see a new chunk of production code from Carl. I still think there's a lot to be learned from Carl's ideas, and would love to see LLMs get more good quality production Rebol code to learn from.

Regarding LLMs and Rebol, exposing the LLM to source code yields good results. For example, after Qwen was familiarized with the Red source code, it started writing programs in it much better :)

Sergey, If you have any interest in getting LLMs to work better with Rebol, the best practice I'm aware of is to generally to build skill files for specific domains of coding tasks, keeping them as small and focused as is reasonably possible, so they don't take up more context than is required in a session. If you're interested, it might potentially be useful to check out the skill file I had Kimi K3 make, to build simple 3D games in R3: https://com-pute.com/nick/r3-wasm-3d-skill-3b.zip After having Kimi K3 work long and hard to understand how to build these few basic graphic/3D demos: do http://com-pute.com/nick/3d_demo_oneline.r3 do http://com-pute.com/nick/3d-torus-oneline.r3 do http://com-pute.com/nick/3d-blaster-oneline.r3 I had it create the skill file above from what it had learned during all that trial and error effort. The skill file enables any LLM, in any harness, to more easily create basic 3D demos and other graphics with Draw (the particular skill file above was created for the browser-based WASM version of R3 demoed at http://xqx1.com:8080 , which is available to download and run at https://com-pute.com/nick/r3-wasm-runtime.zip): The additional driving and ray-casting examples below were created by the old version of Deepseek V4 Flash (which is much less capable than v4.1), using only that skill - with absolutely no other background info or fine-tuning provided: do http://com-pute.com/nick/3d-driver-oneline.r3 do http://com-pute.com/nick/arena-watch-oneline.r3 do http://com-pute.com/nick/demo.r3 Before being provided the skill file above, Deepseek was unable to successfully build such 3D apps within a reasonable amount of time and effort. In general, it's best to use the most intelligent model in your budget, to complete the work of solving a class of coding task, and then use that model, in that session, to create the skill, from the work it's completed, and the lessons it's learned from working through the iterations needed to filter out successful guideline patterns and reference code examples. A lower quality model will generally be better able to use well structured skill instructions and example code composed by a smarter model, than it will be able to solve a challenging problem from scratch.