Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 10:42 PM Christian (Fuchs) <kde at fuchsnet.ch> wrote:

> Hi Ben,


Hey Christian,


>
>
> 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.
>

We're simply using something from the Mattermost stack to perform the
bridging, it has nothing else to do with Mattermost.
This bridge is the legacy Telegram <-> IRC bridge.

It's configuration can be seen at
https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/irc-notifications/-/blob/master/telegram-bridge/channels.json
and does not appear to contain any graphics related groups.

Either way, those channels should migrate to the Matrix provided bridge if
they still need bridging (ideally the Telegram channels would be shutdown
as they're a significant source of abuse)


>
> 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?
>

Pursuivant is responsible for the announcement of commits and bugs.
As of late we have only seen removals of this functionality (see
https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/irc-notifications/-/commits/master?ref_type=heads)
from channels, hence why i'm slating it for decommissioning.


>
> 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.
>

Yes, there is a cost-benefit analysis to all services we run however - and
if there is a minimal number of people benefiting from it, sometimes it is
time to retire a service.

Note that the 30 I quoted was a count of TCP connections - so included
inbound and outbound links.
The number of connected clients is much, much smaller - so it is possible
there are some IRC connections still active for people that are no longer
around, or who have moved to Matrix and not deactivated the BNC.


>
> 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


Cheers,
Ben


>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
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