Proposal: close the official project IRC channels

[Elly Fong-Jones]

Hello folks,

As you may or may not know, we run a handful of official project channels:

https://www.chromium.org/irc

these are generally moderated by a couple of volunteer community members, usually me and thakis@, and are pretty low-traffic. As far as I know, there are no "official" uses of them at all. They are currently on Freenode, which has become the center of some amount of controversy, although there's no specific reason that they have to be there.

I propose that we cease having these "official" channels, since they are ~unused and very few developers hang out in them; they are basically just a moderation burden for the community team (i.e. me) since as official spaces our code of conduct applies there.

This would entail:

1. Closing the channels and redirecting users to the developer Slack (which is vastly more lively and contains a lot less spam) and

2. Taking down the irc page on www.chromium.org

I'm happy to do the work of both of those.

Does anyone object to this course of action? Project members objecting, please let me know if you are willing to take on the work of enforcing the CoC in those channels :)

-- elly

[Christian Biesinger]

I think that's fine but do want to point out that unlike IRC not anybody can join our slack, unless the policy has changed? (Used to be that you need to show you are contributing before you can get into slack)

Christian

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[Elly Fong-Jones]

I believe that's correct, although IMO that is a feature, and is why the Slack both has a lot less CoC enforcement issues and a lot less spam :)

-- elly

[Dirk Pranke]

I believe we should shut off the channel (I've actually had this on my to-do list for a little while now).

I don't think we should keep it around when it's not actively been supported.

I do acknowledge the limitations of Slack as an alternative, but AFAIK there's little to no desire generally in the community to keep supporting IRC nor to maintain two separate chat communities.

If the limitations to joining Slack are really an issue, I suppose we could look into what it might take to drop them and report back, but this doesn't currently feel like a big problem to me. I would be happy to learn otherwise.

-- Dirk

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[Avi Drissman]

Given that Freenode just dropped all channel registrations a few hours ago (

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/o0263h/) it’s probably time. 

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[K. Moon]

Given the lack of engagement, I've been thinking we should consolidate on Slack for a while, but didn't know if there were any users that were really committed to staying on IRC. +1 from me.

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[Joe Mason]

If I understand correctly, that means the official IRC channels are now gone, and the question is whether to create new ones in the same place and continue moderating them as before, or remove references to them from the docs and publicize that any new channels created in the same place are unofficial and unaffiliated. Right?

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[Elly Fong-Jones]

I haven't touched the channels in any way, but as Freenode has just announced that they are (essentially) clearing their services database, I guess that is the question, yes.

-- elly

[K. Moon]

It seems like most FOSS projects have moved their IRC channels to the Libera.Chat network, rather than continuing with freenode, but I agree this is mostly a policy/documentation question at this point.

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[Christian Biesinger]

Freenode is now blocking IRCCloud, which I think a number or Googlers (including me) are using, so I even more support this plan.

Christian

[MD MANJURUL HAQUE]

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[Elly Fong-Jones]

In light of the lack of any objections, the easy reversibility of this action, and the affirmative consent from all of the other regular IRC users, I'm going to execute this now by editing the wiki page to no longer link to the channels and instead direct people to Slack.

Thanks folks!

-- elly