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List:       kde-community
Subject:    Re: Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)
From:       Kenny Duffus <kenny () kde ! org>
Date:       2023-05-21 13:59:36
Message-ID: 3164197.5fSG56mABF () ikonos
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On Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:37:45 BST Ben Cooksley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> For some time now, the level of use of our IRC services - notably being
> Pursuivant and the Telegram Matterbridge, but also including sKreamer - has
> been on the decline.
> 
> I'd therefore like to permanently retire all three of these services.
> 
> Depending on the level of community interest, we may opt to retain
> pursuivant however I'd like for it to be rebuilt as a Matrix native service
> rather than being a continuation of our existing irker based bot that
> occasionally has issues and falls off.
> 
> Given that we are now fairly well migrated to Matrix, the need to maintain
> our Telegram bridging is much reduced, and I'd therefore like to retire
> that without replacement.
> 

Hi

IRC is still a supported part of KDE Community's chat/IM alongside Matrix and we \
don't have any plans for that to change

We are however looking at some options with Libera.chat staff on improving the \
situation currently where we are using the Matrix Foundation managed public Libera \
bridge that isn't getting as much support & maintenance as it could perhaps do with, \
due to a lack of resources available on the Matrix side. A current issue is us not \
being able to bridge new Rooms/channels which disconnects some of our community and \
is not an acceptable long term situation

As Fuchs pointed out it isn't Mattermost that we use for Telegram bridging. Telegram \
is currently mainly using a mautrix-telegram bridge run for us by EMS, this was only \
ever planned as a short term service to aid in getting the users in the unofficial \
Telegram rooms to migrate over to Matrix. Some rooms are still using the legacy \
Telegram <> IRC <> Matrix bridging due to issues with the number of users in some \
rooms and broken permissions on the Telegram side

The current situation with Community members using Telegram is that the majority also \
have Matrix accounts that they use to take part in other chats. This results in  a \
duplication in users in lots of  our rooms that has negative impacts on Matrix and \
IRC having to handle all these extra users/connections. The Telegram bridge is also a \
major source of spam coming into us and onto IRC. There isn't anything we can do to \
properly manage this as we have no control over how Telegram is operated.

The current plan is for the Telegram bridge to be decommissioned later this year. We \
may consider alternative options for some outreach related channels, but within KDE \
it is redundant

> In terms of sKreamer, it's primary utility has been to provide
> announcements of Forum posts and bugbot services. With Matrix providing
> site previews, and the Forum in imminent replacement by Discourse, both of
> these are no longer necessary - so I'd like to retire it without
> replacement as well.
> 
> The only remaining service of contention here is the BNC, which has
> significantly less use now than it did many years ago - with only 30 active
> connections at the time of writing. It therefore appears to be of much less
> need than it was in years past, and I'd also like to retire it as well.
> 

I personally think we should keep operating BNC as we still have a large number of \
our community who choose to use IRC and it is a valued service to them

> Finally, many years ago (prior to my time in Sysadmin) we started providing
> Jabber services for the domains KDETalk.net and KDE.org. Due to abuse
> however, we have for a long time had to have registration on KDETalk.net
> disabled (KDE.org was always a manual registration). Much like the BNC,
> this appears to only have 19 active clients at the time of writing. As our
> official channel for chat is essentially Matrix now, I would like to retire
> this as well.
> 
> Together, all of these retirements will allow us to retire one of our
> smaller DigitalOcean servers (the load all of these generate is
> computationally small and thus cheap, however they do occupy mental
> headspace that is better served focusing on other areas of our
> infrastructure).
> 
> Comments on the above?
> 


-- 

	Kenny
	(Pronouns: he/him)


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