Alternatives to IRC

Communications Team
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I reread the article and I understand that the criticism is quite weak; for me the most important part here is not that Slack is closed source; but that Slack is, IMO, just another member of the dot-com bubble 2.0, and, as with many other tech unicorns, the investors behind it are trying to convince us that we must use it just to justify the valuation before the IPO.

in the near future we'll see if my concerns are justified or not; anyway, good-old IRC will still be there after the new tech bubble bursts.

Slack is more than just chat; AFAIK, the idea behind it is something similar to Google Wave, but done in a better way.

to be honest, I'm really tired of following up many of these new ideas; I'm old and I prefer to deal with boring (and proved) technologies (like email, forums and plaint-text chat) as each one of them solves a specific problem in a very good way.

I really don't understand why somebody wants to be always on for work; communication using smartphone apps is most of the time superficial as you don't have time for reflection; but that's me and I'm a "weird" guy in present times.

I think there's no silver bullet for solving communication issues with newbies that don't want to learn Plone, but to solve some immediate problem for their current employer, some sort of Stack Overflow syndrome.

if somebody needs/wants to use Slack, just use it; but let's not forget the main issue behind this long thread: should we switch away from IRC? why?

I agree, as long as we don't sell ourselves in the process.

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The why has been stated very clearly. Irc has no scroll back or persistent history so makes it useless for anyone outside of american or European timezones. Making everyone pay for irccloud doesn't solve this issue of making our way of collaborating more inclusive.

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The need for an IRC history is widely overrated.

-aj

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The way we use IRC was part of the early Internet culture. Open-source folks have historically been well-educated in that culture. But that is clearly changing, and the new newbies think it's something more like chat features on consumer web sites. So, they think that if there is no immediate response, there won't be one at all.

I don't know if switching to something like gitter or slack will help. At least if they bother to start the app again, they might see a reply in the queue.

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We've got two different discussions going on in this thread:

  1. What's a good IRC replacement for our team coordination;

  2. What's a good IRC alternative for supporting newbies and bringing them into the community.

Slack may -- or may not -- be a good answer to #1. But I have yet to see anyone really dispute Kim's point that it's not a good solution for #2.

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@smcmahon neither slack, gitter or irc is a good solution to 2.

Stackoverflow is the best solution.
Discourse is also good.

Trying to support a quality realtime help desk for for a global audience has so far resulted in a patchy result IMO. Not sending newbies to IRC also solves the "burned by macyet" issue.

BTW, stackoverlow integration in slack would be the best of both worlds. ie, don't encourage newbies to use slack/IRC but encourage community members to answer stackoverflow questions by notifying them in realtime.

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There is http://plone.slackarchive.io/ though ... better than nothing.

For me, it's mainly about making chat more efficient. Each message has a hyperlink, "reaction" emojis can be used for votes, pages and snippets can have threads of their own, typos can be fixed. Little things like these and many others just makes it much more respectful of the time and effort of all participants.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a different topic. Slack is a great tool, those of us who like it should use it, just as some already use Facebook Messenger (for family?), WhatsApp, Line (if you're in Southeast Asia), WeChat, Hangouts, etc.

I don't really think fragmentation is an issue. A conversation is valuable to its participants regardless of where it happens. If it can be referenced by URL later, that's a bonus. Ditto for reading back missed history. In IRC one conversation tends to drown out others (channels helps for this), and if not it's a mess of crosstalk.

They can get email notification, if they install the desktop client they'll get desktop notifications, ditto for mobile. (All configurable; default do-not-disturb overnight.)

I'd rather frame it as: should we pick one chat platform? I don't think we should, and in practice we haven't. E.g. Hangouts have been used a lot for remote participation in sprints. If anyone is afraid of missing out on a message, hang in the #plone-gitter and #plone-irc channels (but I think few people will be interested). If I want to have a conversation with a specific person, I'll probably know where to find them, or someone will refer me.

And I'd agree with Dylan, IRC is just as terrible as Slack for newbie support. There does exist a Discourse integration, don't know if it's workable.

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People can already subscribe themselves to email/RSS for a tag in StackOverflow, and can Watch a topic or category in Discourse, so this doesn't really have to be devolved to the chat tool. If someone isn't motivated to track the Newbie Questions category here (which doesn't actually exist), then they probably won't be that motivated to respond to messages in #newbies either.

The way this plays out in IRC is that old-timers often blithely carry on their deep conversations while hapless newbies yelp a few times and slink away. I say this with the greatest appreciation of all the gurus who have helped me over the years, but the fact is that they get burnt out, they're not always around, they have deadlines. The newbie experience can still be pretty harsh.

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This discussion becomes religious and pointless. Folks, this is a community project, we can not dictate people were to hang around.

I'll for my person hang around on IRC and watch if there are incoming requests on slack and gitter using the IRC bridge. That's were I like to be. Slack does not fell good to me. Do not ask me why. Other are more on stackoverflow and slack or gitter or whatever pops up in future and what ever dies will go. Mailinglists are dead and Discourse is now our channel. That worked fine.

Anyway we should direct the newbies to a place we're they get answers. IRC is in fact such a place and it will stay this place because it is core part of our Plone-the-Community culture and core developer people and in-depth integrators are there available for the past 15 years. Plone even started as a project at IRC. Alan Runyan and Alex Limi made this possible with IRC and the atlantic ocean between them.

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I like IRC and use a Quasselcore as "bouncer" for IRC, no need for IRCCloud here.