On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 9:50 AM Knurpht-openSUSE <knurpht@opensuse.org> wrote:
Op woensdag 10 april 2024 05:11:00 CEST schreef Simon Lees:
#opensuse-chat really should never be anyone's first interaction with the community, that is the roll of #opensuse. The roll of #opensuse-chat has always been for offtopic discussion allowing regular users of #opensuse to discuss things considered off topic there.
This extended to the point where on freenode we used to have a bot setup with the command "!offtopic <user>" which channel moderators could use to send a message saying. <user>: this current discussion is offtopic for #opensuse, please continue the discussion in #opensuse-chat.
Naturally over time a community of long term users have developed there and formed strong long term friendships, so I am hesitant to want to take that space away from them and occasionally if people get really off-topic on the main channel and someone else is looking for help we do still send people there.
In hindsight #opensuse-offtopic might be a better name but the channel has now existed in its current form since before I joined the project 15 years ago, so I think it'd take a pretty strong case to move it. Also unlike Matrix and Discord irc channels are not immediately discoverable so I wouldn't expect large numbers of new users to end up there.
For the record, I haven't always been regularly in that channel because at times in the past the volume of posts was far to high for me to keep up with. But semi regularly i'll join to have a chat with people i've know from #opensuse for many years. Sorry to say so, but this feels ( and will feel for others ) as a kick in the nuts of moderators and admins who try to keep the community safe. When we created the CoC we all agreed that these apply to all our platforms. No exceptions. The mods have over a long time received complaints about our IRC and this message implicitely dismisses those complaints. Needless to say that I firmly disagree with that. And as a result, we have the first mod resigning now. So we are losing the wrong people. Myself I will also reconsider if I still want to be a moderator/ admin.
As an individual (and not as a member of the board), I have been unhappy about our IRC presence for a long time. I don't frequent there anymore because of it. I personally do not feel IRC is a good entry point for the openSUSE community and will generally refer people to our Matrix rooms as things are much better there. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!