Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[Christian (Fuchs)]

Hi Ben, 

while I can't comment on the Jabber side, some questions about IRC and the 
Telegram bridges. The latter seems to be still in use in some of the more 
graphically oriented communities, e.g. quite a handful of people in the VDG 
chat seem to be using it, do we have numbers on that, also what services does 
that bridge to? The name suggests Mattermost (?), but I don't think we have 
that. Depending on which services it bridges to, some channels might like to 
have that. If it's none of importance, then yeah, probably that can be gone.

Skreamer / Pursuivant: I'd retire these when the replacement is there, and not 
before it. I also seem to have missed which part does the auto announcement of 
e.g. bug reports, since that was active / fetching, and if I understand site 
previews correctly, that is passive. As in: no automatic notice of new bug 
reports, but only when someone / something actively links them, correct?

Bouncer wise: 30 connections isn't exactly none, especially if that contains 
active people. These would be forced to migrate to a service (and register at 
such) which is not under KDEs control and, as far as I am aware, has a 
mandatory registration.  As far as memory serves some communities, e.g. I 
think krita, still had active devs / maintainers on IRC.

I understand that we'd like to remove old cruft, but some parts of this seem 
to be in active use and low maintenance, so personally I wouldn't sunset them, 
at least not before a proper replacement is in place and not just planned.

Kind regards, 

Christian 

Am Sonntag, 21. Mai 2023, 11:37:45 CEST schrieb Ben Cooksley:
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ben