On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 9:15 PM, John Burwell <john.burw...@shapeblue.com> wrote:
> All, > > For me, the most significant issues with IRC is that there is no > searchable history, backlog to catch up when offline, or good mobile > clients (yes, mobile IRC clients exists, but work poorly in my view). > While some of these solutions can be solved by running an IRC proxy such as > znc or using a service such as IRCcloud, it far more effort than Slack. > > On the other side, as Rene mentions, Freenode is the Github of open source > chat (or, since Freenode is older, one could say that Github is the > Freenode of open source code hosting). People go to #cloudstack on Freenode reflexively. I would bet that they > often arrive at the channel without consulting cloudstack.apache.org. > For me, the value of being part of the hub of open source chat trumps the > creature comforts offered by Slack because it brings in more people. > > For these reasons, I am -1 on moving away from Freenode. I also like the > idea of getting the ASFbot notifications out of channel. I also think it > would beneficial to consolidate #cloudstack and #cloudstack-dev. Exposing > users to development conversations seems very beneficial to me. It doesn't change the fact that a lot of visitors are met with silence though. I'm not saying that Slack automatically is any different, just that attendance is a larger issue than the chosen platform. The active CloudStack community isn't large, we might believe or think it is, but IMHO it really isn't. A brief overview of my IRC history for last week is available here [1]. I counted 9 or so different nicks asking something, where basically zero got an appropriate answer/response. Truth be told, that doesn't look good, and IMHO is worse than not being present. The mailing list statistics for cloudstack-users last month reveals that there was 18 people who sent more than 5 emails. Considering that cloudstack users and cloudstack developers (whenever they differ), don't necessarily have the same needs, here's my suggestion; - abandon/delete #cloudstack-dev on freenode - start an announce channel on freenode for asfbot messages if enough people wants it - make #cloudstack the primary developer hangout assuming we want that, topic should mention that it isn't meant as a support channel - consider using something else as primary (non mailing list) source for users The platform should imho; - not require a client regular computers usually don't have. Ie. it should work flawlessly with a browser - be searchable and have history available to anyone - work out of the box on phones/tablets. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i49nuk6yiiip4to/Screenshot%202015-07-02%2021.34.54.png?dl=0 -- Erik
