Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[Kenny Duffus]

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)