Now that Google Summer of Code is under way, I'd like to get the community's opinion again on using Gitter (https://gitter.im/sympy/sympy).
Last time, some people were concerned about the OAuth scope requested by Gitter. This is explained at https://gitter.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200176672-Authenticating-with-GitHub. I personally think Gitter is great. It's free, persistant (you don't have to be online to see messages), and the developers are friendly. It also has cool features that integrate with GitHub. Previously we have used IRC, and our channel is still active. But the channel is not very active. You can see from the logs (http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_logs/sympy) that quite a few people come to the channel with questions, but no one is there to answer them. With Gitter, someone could answer the question later on. Anyway, I'd like to know if the community supports making Gitter the "official" chat room of SymPy (and if no, do you have any better alternatives?). If so, then I will add links to the home page and the GSoC info page, and also to the /topic of #sympy. If we do this, I'd appreciate it if people could idle in the channel, and provide support to people, especially the prospective GSoC students. If you use Mac OS X, you can get their Mac app (https://gitter.im/apps), and go to the Notification settings in System Preferences and change the notifications for Gitter to alert instead of badge, so that they stay on your screen. There is also a menubar icon that badges. Getting help in IRC (mostly from Ondrej) made a huge difference for me when I started with SymPy, especially when it came to git issues (which everyone has). So I think it's really important to provide that to our students. Aaron Meurer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6KEYaEH52MF_uR8saP0d-asxrXbuT%3D5yPGs9UAwBF%3D5Mg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
