Posted by Pascal- on August 1, 2019 at 9:37am
Should we move the community from IRC to Slack?
I used to be active on IRC, but noticed questions were getting less and less responses. After a while I figured out a lot of the community has moved to Slack instead.
Questions seem te be getting a lot more attention on Slack now.
Should we make an attempt to move the community from IRC to Slack?
A lot of pages on Drupal.org could use an update regarding this as well.
I also noticed that there is no Drupal.org webmasters group on Slack, maybe we should add that?
I haven't been active on IRC for a while now, so I'm not sure how many people/groups are still using it.
To me it seems a lot more people are using Slack now and it would be nice and handy to have everyone in one place.
Comments
I feel like that's maybe
I feel like that's maybe already happened, at least in part. I'm definitely in the same situation, I'm not sure when I last logged in to IRC.
https://www.drupal.org/ircchat already has a link to https://www.drupal.org/slack which lists the channels. I don't think there's a Webmasters channel (at least not one that I'm in), there is a general #drupalorg channel.
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We are targeting the future
We are targeting the future usage of https://drupalchat.me as the main goto chat system. That is already mentioned on the main irc channels description.
For more information please read https://www.drupal.org/drupalchat
Drupalchat.me doesn't have the limitations of slack, is fully supported by our community and is opensource like Drupal. Source code can be reached at https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat
Cheers!
How active is the
How active is the drupalchat.me?
While it may make more sense from a technical standpoint, if most of our community is on Slack, it makes more sense to move to Slack even if it's not ideal.
We should figure out how active each medium currently is.
We should also find out where the people we need to be active are currently active and if they would be willing to move.
The commerceguys are a good example, I think they're active and offering support on Slack? Not sure about IRC & drupalchat.me?
Depends...
How active you think each medium is depends on where you are and what you are discussing.
The Drupal Core development community is mostly using Slack, for instance. Other groups that predominantly use Slack are Documentation, Usability, Mentoring.
On the other hand, I believe that the European Drupal community channels are predominantly on Drupalchat.me. A big drawback of Slack is that it is a commercial enterprise. We have a free account there, but it is limited (for example, the messages vanish after some time has elapsed or some number of them have accumulated). Also their terms of use basically mean they can do whatever they want with the chats (or at least, I think so?).
One other note is that I think many folks lean towards Slack is that they are already using it for work, so they already have the apps etc. and it is familiar to them. So, as much as it has its drawbacks, it may be difficult to get people to move, or to want to move. The move from IRC to Slack just sort of happened -- no one said "You Must Use Slack". The important discussions just started happening there (at least in some channels). Moving to DrupalChat is unlikely to be a mandatory thing either... we can hope that people migrate over there, but right now, the Slack channels are more active (at least for those groups I listed above).
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