Hi! I just want to make this post to talk about CrossTalk in it’s current state and document what’s in store for the immediate/long term future.
What’s currently being worked on
I’ve been on a development hiatus for the past month or two, which has since ended. I’ve been working on mainly WLM stuff for the past week or 2 - thanks to kae I now have the profile services implemented!
I’m also working on finishing address book/contacts management - it is functionally complete other than the friends in common functionality, currently trying to figure out the response format for the, well, FindFriendsInCommon SOAP action 
Capabilities interop not just between old WLM and new WLM but also other platforms like AIM is also being worked on.
I’ve also implemented several bug fixes for Yahoo! Messenger (contacts showing as pending when not, conferences have been fixed and re-enabled, other presence bugs etc). Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 support will be delayed until a future update as I want to focus on getting the currently supported versions fully stable and implemented first.
I’m also fine releasing AIM with it’s current implemented featureset, however there are stiill several bugs that are preventing it from being rolled out. Those will be ironed out over the coming weeks.
All in all I’m just ready to get 0.6 out. It’s planned featureset has not changed but for the sake of not prolonging the development time any more than it needs to be/reducing my own work burden, 0.6.0 will not contain all features/changes on release, they will be released in future updates (0.6.1/0.6.2 etc). The initial goals for 0.6.0 were much too ambitious for just me. It was drafted with the assumption of FOSS contributors/devs other than me chipping in and assisting with development - which unfortunately hasn’t happened.
Mid-term goals
I’m planning on switching from ClassicConnect’s IRC server to hosting our own within the next month (and later once chatrooms are implemented, using CrossTalk itself via it’s IRC frontend). This is for multiple reasons: self-sufficiency - I’d rather be reliant on third party services as little as possible, disagreements with the staff team (particularly about their inconsistent position on Escargot/NINA - using the service despite their past statements against it), and overall I think it’d be healthier for the project in the long run to foster our own community rather than piggyback off of another :P.
I’m also working on a few auxliary projects for both CrossTalk and WebTV Redialed.
One of them currently being worked on is uFind - a search engine and article viewer for legacy machines, intended as a replacement for FrogFind. You can search the web, including image search, view modern articles/pages in a stripped down format that is viewable in basic browsers, and even search ProtoWeb!
It works similarly to SearX - in that it’s a meta search engine that propogates results from other search engines (in this case, DuckDuckGo). Images will also be converted server-side into a format that’s more compatible with legacy machines (for static images JPEG or GIF if they contain transparency) before they’re sent as search results. It will replace DuckDuckGo as the primary search engine on both WebTV Redialed and within Windows Live Messenger on CrossTalk.
The reason this exists is moreso the sorry state FrogFind is in nowadays. The main instance is down, it’s functionality is deteriorating, it’s written in PHP which I would genuinely rather use raw x86 asm, and the only actively developed fork is pretty much entirely vibe coded. Don’t count on Action Retro also not vibe coding it if he ever decides to pick it up again (doubt it after this long), as judging by his recent content he seems to be all in on the generative AI craze. Very disappointing considering I used to enjoy his content quite a bit, but I digress.
Long-term goals
The eventual goal is to fold WebTV Redialed and CrossTalk into, effectively, one. In that they share the same user database, and management of a WebTV Redialed account can (optionally) be done via your CrossTalk account settings. Obviously it won’t re-use the name CrossTalk, this is just a temporary naming scheme.
Some ideas I’ve had for features this would allow: e-mail notifications within MSN, easily adding/managing boxes that can access your accuont via an SSID, 2FA when connecting via a new box/new IP by logging into the site, and entering an access code into WebTV to proceed, etc. Mail and perhaps maybe Page Builder will also become accessible outside the bounds of WebTV as well. The long term goal is to basically create my own Passport/Hotmail systems, with blackjack and hookers :P.
The primary concern is migrating WebTV Redialed’s user data, as WebTV Redialed retains minisrv’s JSON user storage. Migrating account data itself shouldn’t be difficult, the issue is mail/favorites/page builder storage being in their own formats.
Moving both services to a new microservices based architecture would also help a lot with achieving this, however that is a more longer term goal.
You can help!
If you have development skills in Python/Golang/C++/C#, networking experience, and/or experience with or documentation for protocols like MSNP/YMSG/OSCAR etc, your help would be greatly appreciated! All of CrossTalk’s components are open source and contributions are greatly welcome.
AI generated/AI assisted contributions are not allowed, however.
Simply spreading the word also helps! Tell your friends, tell your dog, mention it in internet forums like this one, let retro-oriented content creators know. Anything to get the name out there helps! The more people the merrier
All in all I’m just more than happy to move on from the rut CrossTalk has been in for the past few months.