Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[Ben Cooksley]

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 1:06 AM Carl Schwan <carl at carlschwan.eu> wrote:

> On Monday, 22 May 2023 00:26:09 CEST argonel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > 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".
>
> The requirement of not being inactive for 30 days is not due to Matrix.
> Matrix
> doesn't care about your inactivity, but his is actually a Libera.chat
> policy,
> which was a requirement for libera.chat authorizing the bridging. This is
> the
> same issue with the fact that when you join a room, you can't see the chat
> history from before you joined the room.
>
> I understand that this requirement is due to some technical issues, as IRC
> doesn't support having so many connections open at the same time but it's
> a
> bit wrong to blame Matrix for that. I do wonder why BNC is not affected by
> this
> policy, but I suppose it's because there are way less users using IRC.
>

Historically we were impacted by connection limit issues, and required (at
the time) Freenode staff to grant us an iline to allow us to exceed the
normal connection limits.
We still had to throttle reconnections though - which made maintenance on
the server that hosted the BNC very painful as it would take a good 2 hours
or so for everyone to be reconnected.

I just had a look and the number of active users remains the same - 6.


>
> Cheers,
> Carl
>

Cheers,
Ben
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