To try out writing in Gobby simultaneously with others you have to connect to a host. Each Gobby is capable to host a new session, so one of the participants of a session has to be reachable on a port. If you are on a router and port forwarding is not specified you can not host a gobby-session. You can still participate on a session hosted on another computer.

The person hosting the session connects to the localhost on his computer by clicking create new session. If you want to host and do not know your ip you can look it up on whatismyip.com. Tell the others who shall join your session this ip and the portnumber you chose.

All the others connect to the ip of this hosting computer by

• clicking Join session
• entering the ip and the portnumber

We are using gobby for tings: That are regular or irregular online meetings using different colloborative software in combination but centered to a collab-editor. Sundays on 18:00 UTC are the regular tings. See the ting-wiki please. We love participation!

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MattisManzel: I do not understand it yet, Phil, sorry. Every Gobby can host a session - that's great, so we do not need to set up a server. I set up a test-session gobby-test on my localhost using the default 6522 port. How can others now log into that session? Should they know my ip?

phil: Correct, the port needs to be reachable from the outside (so one would need a port forwarding on the router at worst) and they need to know your IP. We will eventually release a real dedicated server (it exists one within the libobby tests, but nobody bothers to set it up), perhaps when #21 is implemented (#10 got into the repository yesterday, which is great, but it still needs some improvements in the GUI).

MattisManzel: Up to now we took our tings on MoonEdit? hosting the sessions on is-root.de where also s23-wiki sits. We have a mediawiki-extension including the moonedit pages via a plaintext-page into the wiki. A standalone server solution would be of great interest for us, in order to make the gobby sessions permanent and stable. When everybody can host and this everybody shuts off his computer everything is gone ;) Having both standalone server and everybody can host would be tremendous. Sorry if I express things a bit strangely here and now, I do not know very much about these technical stuff, just a little bit.

phil: I know and I agree with you. But we are not there yet, there should be some privileges implemented first. Probably this will enter obby 0.3.0 together with a dedicated server. I know about your tings and that you need such a server.

sylvie : It seems at this time it's quiet difficult for basic users to test gobby without a server adress, I mean to know where to go to try gobby ...so If I understand what it's said above I will wait the 0.3.0 version :)

phil: No, they just need to host themselves and give the IP out. That's all. There's no need for a dedicated server right now. Just some folks want central servers for their meetings, but that's something different actually.