Tech report - August 2026

Hello everyone,
Most month's report leads with a feature. This month it leads with an email that never arrived.

August 31, 2026 · 5 min read

A Devroom manager wrote in to say they had never received our email. Our system disagreed: green checkmark, Sent, no errors. We spent one to two weeks chasing this down, and the reason turned out to be almost embarrassing. Our domain, fossunited.org, had no SPF record, no DMARC policy, and an incomplete DKIM setup. We had been sending real mail through AWS SES for a while with no proper way for a receiving server to verify it was really us. We also found the original recipient had separately landed on AWS's bounce/suppression list, quietly blocklisted after an earlier failed send, which is its own lesson in how invisible a "successful" send can be. If you run your own mail sending, check your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC today. "No errors" and "actually delivered" are not the same thing, and the gap between them can sit there for a very long time before anyone notices.

Go verify (y)ours by: https://spf.access.nu/

Once that was fixed, we internally setup two small pieces of infrastructure we now depend on daily. We self-host Miniflux for our internal RSS reading (only few use, I'm one heavy user), replacing whatever scattered bookmarks we were using before, and alongside it, Umami for analytics, watching traffic on Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the rest of the FOSS United network without handing that data to a third party. Both are the kind of quiet, unglamorous tools that make the rest of the work possible.

Speaking of quiet, unglamorous work: this month's biggest project was accessibility, and it deserves more than a passing mention.

We started a focused audit of the IndiaFOSS 2026 pages and their neighbours, as a slice of the larger accessibility effort tracked in #786. The stats page, the talks archive, booths, pre-events, and the devrooms are done for this round. The schedule page, the CFP form, proposal details, and ticketing are still on the list. I have been going through pages with a screen reader (Orca, on Linux) to check whether things actually make sense when spoken aloud rather than just looking right on screen, and Rahul has been working through tabbing order and keyboard navigation across the same pages. Reading a page with your eyes closed teaches you things that reading a design mockup never will.

We also got real help from outside the core team. Gauri found that the Schedule page has low-contrast UI that fails WCAG AA (#1707), and Amith Biju traced a progress-report issue back to a frappe-ui component that needs an upstream version bump to fix many accessibility issue over dashboard properly (#1696). Both are exactly the kind of finding that is easy to miss from the inside and obvious once someone points it out. If you use assistive technology and hit something that does not work right on any FOSS United page, please open an issue. One report per page is enough to help us prioritize.

On the product side, one addition We've afresh is My Tickets page. If you have ever bought a ticket to a FOSS United event and then lost the confirmation email, or wanted to check whether you are registered for something six months from now, this page is for you. Log in, and it shows every ticket tied to your account, split into upcoming and concluded, each with its QR code ready to go, and a direct download and calendar button. Small thing, long overdue.

Jobs, clubs, and the events timeline all picked up a list view this month, next to the existing grid, so you can scan them the way that suits you, credit to Siddharth Bansal (@sidd190) for that work. He also spent time hardening our ticket and check-in endpoints after a security audit, his first real dive into the fossunited codebase after joining last month.

The CFP form also grew some organiser-facing flexibility: event organisers can now override session types, categories, and speaker-field requirements to fit their own event, rather than being stuck with one global shape for every CFP on the platform. And there is a small but appreciated addition for attendees: events can now say plainly whether lunch, coffee, or nothing is provided, so nobody has to wonder or ask around.

Two more things worth a line each. The devroom pages got a design tweak with a themed pattern now running through the listing and each page, keeping them visually compact and consistent. And workshops, booths, the FOSS Awards page, and pre-events all went live for IndiaFOSS 2026, each managed the same way, directly through Frappe's page tooling rather than a code deploy. It is a good reminder that not everything that ships this month is a pull request.

Last thing: we started a weekly reading session as a team, going through resources on codebase practices and better software habits. We will start sharing what we read here, so keep an eye out next month.

Here's what we read for this month:

Now, the technical list for those who like the details.

Accessibility Audit (#786)

IndiaFOSS 2026 and neighbouring pages audited this round: stats, archive (list/speakers/talk), booths, pre-events, devrooms. Fixes for tabbing order, sponsor-tier announcements, and misc a11y issues on the archive and dashboard. Pending: schedule, CFP form, proposal details, ticketing.

My Tickets Page

New /my-tickets page shows every ticket bought by the session user, grouped into upcoming/concluded, with cached QR codes, calendar, and download buttons.

Visit -> https://fossunited.org/dashboard/my-tickets

List/Grid Views (#1650, #1663, #1664)

List view toggle added to jobs, clubs, and the events timeline. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Visit: https://fossunited.org/jobs, https://fossunited.org/events/timeline, https://fossunited.org/clubs

Security Hardening (#1704)

Ticket and check-in endpoints hardened following an internal audit. Credits: Siddharth Bansal.

Order Revalidation (#1698)

Orders are revalidated before fulfillment; refunds lock before the Razorpay call; automatic refunds removed per the no-refund policy. First contribution from Anas Khan.

CFP Form Customization (#1727, #1726)

Organisers can override session types, categories, contact-info visibility, and speaker-photo requirement per event. The CFP form now shows an event's own description as its guideline text, falling back to the global one only when unset.

Ticketing & T-shirts (#1712, #1716, #1695)

Free ticket coupons can include a t-shirt; volunteer forms can ask for size; events can declare a catering option (none / lunch / coffee).

Infrastructure: Email Delivery

Fixed missing SPF/DKIM/DMARC records on fossunited.org. Full story linked above.

Self-Hosted Tools

Miniflux for internal RSS reading; Umami for analytics across Forklore, Licence to Learn, and the FOSS United network.

Fixes

Ambiguous link text across docs and web pages fixed (#1697, first contribution from saksham mishra); underlined href links inside paragraphs; grant currency sum fix on number cards; Bruno API test runner added to pre-commit hooks.

For the full & detailed list: CHANGELOG · docs

As always, drop suggestions and issues at GitHub or Codeberg.