On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Rene Moser <m...@renemoser.net> wrote:
> Hi > > On 02.07.2015 10:39, Sebastien Goasguen wrote: > > We need to take a decision here. Shall we officially abandon IRC and out > a notice there that points towards Slack. > > -1 for abondon IRC. > > * IRC is simple and easy, well known and distributed. Not every question > fits to IRC, thats ok. If it gets too complicated ML is preferred. > > IRC requires a client and anything that happens while you are disconnected is unknown to you. OK for devs that typically have a client running in screen somewhere, bad for users not already used to/on IRC. > * IRC freenode is the convention of how to get direct contact to devs of > any open source project without need of invitation and email > registration, and saved me "my ass" several times... > That is true, and I generally look for an IRC channel on freenode for projects I have question about myself. However, if we decide to stick with IRC we have to get attendance up. There's not really any point of having an empty channel, just 'to be on IRC'. Currently there are 23 nicks online on #cloudstack-dev, 2 are known bots, and probably a large percentage of the rest are bouncers or disconnected screens/tmuxes. Did some scrolling on #cloudstack-dev and of the last 5-6 or so questions from other people, only one was answered/replied to at all. The way it is, IMHO, all the ASFBot announces are more of an annoyance than good. Don't get me wrong, I actually like being notified about new Issues and commits, but it floods an inactive channel and drowns unanswered questions/conversations. #cloudstack has more users, isn't drowned by ASFBot, but still has a lot of unanswered questions, and most people seems to only join IRC to ask that one specific question and leave when they haven't received an answer in a reasonable time. As a short term improvement for #cloudstack-dev I would propose to move ASFBot announces to a different channel (#cloudstack-announce, #cloudstack-asfbot, I don't really care what it is called), so that real conversations in #cloudstack-dev doesn't drown in all that information. For the long term solution I don't know what the best solution is, and I depends it varies on your scope of mind. Developers and users have different needs, different skillset and different ways of communicating. For users I actually like the approach of 'OtherStack', to have a stackoverflow/serverfault like web page based on Askbot for questions. It's easy to link to previous questions, it easy to search, everyone knows how to use a browser etc. I realize that such approach probably isn't the best solution for devs, but do they have to use the same thing as primary communication means? -- Erik
