Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[argonel]

On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 3:12 PM Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 10:42 PM Christian (Fuchs) <kde at fuchsnet.ch> wrote:

>> 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 would argue that the low usage is in part due to lack of awareness.
It has a one-line mention on the "Internet Relay Chat" community wiki
page (which wasn't added until 2019) that doesn't even explain the
benefits of using it.

IRC in combination with the BNC is much more suited to intermittent
usage than Matrix is, which currently obligates the user to "be
active" every 30 days, or risk (permanently!) losing access to the
entirety of the history of all of their joined channels (even the
parts for which they were present). The BNC happily buffers the text
until your client is able to reconnect. As an example, this allowed me
to read discussions that happened while I endured an extended power
outage, even when Matrix had decided that I was idle for "too long".

So instead of shuttering the service, I recommend that more attention
be drawn to it.