As you have very likely already noticed, we got into the situation that our IRC channels and Matrix rooms are no longer bridged. That means we now have two isolated places for the chat. As @Dirk pointed out in the other thread, our support page mentions both at the moment. It seems there’s no reasonable solution to restore the bridging at this point. I personally feel we should not split the community and we should instead consolidate the rooms to a single platform.
It was rightfully suggested that we also need to consider future users, who may not be currently in either IRC or Matrix network. It would be great if you share this thread with your friends, colleagues and potential users of Foreman, who are not reading our discourse, IRC and Matrix.
I’m sure there will be a lot of strong feelings one way or the other, but I believe we need to make a decision and move completely to one out of the two. I expect to have some transition period though. We can discuss details in the thread, however I’d like to start the preference survey at this point. Given the decision should be rather quick, I propose to close the poll in 3 weeks, October 18th.
The proposal:
Close the poll on October 18th and make a decision based on it
In the case of a tie or close vote (e.g. 10% diff), pick the one that’s easier to start with for new users (share in replies, which you think is the easier one)
Update the support page mentioning the IM we pick here
Have a transition period of 2 months
Migrate both rooms (theforeman and theforeman-dev) to the same platform
What is your preference regarding current IM situation?
Hi folks - abstaining from the vote as I’m not part of the Foreman community. I’m project lead for Matrix tho, and I’d like to apologise for the failure of the Libera<->Matrix IRC bridge. We are trying to bring it back, but it was hard enough to resource running it in the first place before Libera pulled the plug, and finding the bandwidth to fix it to their satisfaction and persuade them to let it back on is even harder with it having been turned off. So: the intention is there, but the execution could be at least a few months away (unless Matrix or the team at Element has a change of fortune in bandwidth for the better). Apologies again for the disruption and putting you in this position.
I don’t have strong opinions on matrix or IRC from a technical usage point of view (I have my gripes with every chat program I have ever used), so my main consideration is this:
The Pulp community seems to be all Matrix now (at least until such a time where the bridge is back), so I have to use Matrix anyway. I therefore prefer to use Matrix for Foreman as well. I find using two clients in parallel to be much worse than settling on one client (no matter what gripes I might have with it).
Or would kicking these currently dead accounts somehow cause problems for these people if and when the bridge were to come back “a few months from now”?
I’m torn. I really like my IRC setup (https://xkcd.com/1782/) and enjoy the minimal UI. I think it’s a feature that it’s limited. Fewer distractions from UI elements is great and I haven’t found a good console client for Matrix.
On the other hand, I can see my needs are not universal. There’s a good chance we may not reach people because IRC is a barrier.
One thing that speaks in Matrix’s favor is Discourse Chat:
Integrating Matrix and Discourse has some potential that with IRC I don’t see happening, given where the world is heading. While I haven’t tried it out, it (with my community hat on, not my person one) makes me lean to using Matrix. At least for community support.
Now I should probably give weechat-matrix a proper try.
Same! I think Matrix generally has the better why for the community and broader set of users. I just need to try out different interfaces, especially this one as the Web based Matrix UIs I have tried frustrated me (whereas there are other web based chat programs that work great for me).
Some thoughts I wanted to write out. Feels like rambling / “explaining things” but is intended more as “I think about it like this and explain it to myself trying to make sense of it all”.
I also love my IRC setup and I love the way the UI and UX is there – simple not many things moving around if I don’t want it to. On the other hand I have been a very happy Matrix user for many years as well and have been in bridged IRC room from both sides via Matrix even before Libera Chat was bridged “officially” with their own namespace.
They are making great progress and have a good idea of where things should go with the protocol.
I don’t know the Foreman community enough or at all to make a guess as to whether they are familiar with the “IRC culture”. (I can’t put it really into words but IRC has a specific way of doing things that aren’t a thing in Slack/Discord/Matrix/etc.)
Then there is the missing scrollback history that some IRC servers / communities don’t want.
On Slack/Mattermost/Matrix it is somewhat expected by users, that you can search in a room for various things. Not that a chatroom should replace a forum post that could be searched for, but posting in a forum is sometimes a higher threshold than asking a one-off question in a chatroom.
I love Discourse! It really makes using Forums fun again. So seeing them work on trying to integrate Matrix into their product sound really sweet and promising in terms of UX for all Discourse users.
If, by chance, a IRC bridge comes back this would then even include the hardcore IRC folks that really don’t want to switch or that couldn’t find a suitable TUI irc client.
It would be nice to try Discourse chat which is integrated in Discourse core, I think from v3.
but I am also good with using Matrix and the option for integration with Discourse Chat in the future.
I don’t have anything to offer in terms of console based Matrix clients, but if a Hexchat/Konversation style Matrix client may work for you, I’d recommend checking out Quaternion. It’s at least packaged in Fedora and EPEL for CentOS/RHEL 9 and works pretty decently.
Thank you @ara4n for your candid response! The background is of course good to know. The situation is clear now and I think everyone who used the bridge before is rather grateful for the time it was available. While the change may cause inconvenience (like almost every change), I’m sure our community will be able to deal with it.
Sure thing, thanks for the reminder. The dev room has been cleaned up, I’ll continue with the support room in the near future.
After using Quaternion for a bit I can say I like the simple UI a lot more. I found some weird issues where navigation buttons on my secondary (rotated) screen weren’t responding if it was at the top of the screen, but was responding when lower down. I also found I needed kvantum for dark mode support. But overall it’s a good suggestion.
Thanks 38 voters for sharing your preference! We have 3 votes for IRC, 8 saying they are fine with either and drum roll please, 27 votes for matrix.
That means our community will move from IRC to Matrix in the following two months. I’ve opened the PR to fix our guidelines and will be sharing the information on IRC channel from time to time. If you’re on IRC.at this point, it’s highly recommended to move to Matrix.
Update: the community guidelines have been updated, the clean up off both matrix room was completed, there are no more libera.chat users. I’ll start posting on IRC channels from time to time the heads up about channels being decommissioned, everyone who wants to stay in touch should migrate to Matrix by December 15th.
