We’re left without any ops in #meteor on Freenode. Since MDG are not interested in IRC would it be possible for you to pass over control to the most regular/trustworthy users of the channel? It would be nice to be able to set topics highlighting wonderful resources like this forum and recent happenings surrounding Meteor.
My votes go for the nicks dbarrett, pchoo, lampe2, ahr3n and camiel as they’ve all been regulars for a over a year now.
I’m not sure who is currently in control of the channel but the last topic set was by Katie Lee in 2014.
When questions don’t get answered on IRC, they get posted someplace else (e.g. here, or Stack Overflow). The problems and solutions are available to all, and everyone wins.
When questions do get answered on IRC, they enter a black hole. Nobody else benefits. Everyone loses.
The person who would like a real time instantaneous answer, or has a question that is more opened ended and discussion based, or is just looking to talk to people working with a similar technology in a more social environment benefits.
not all people have easy questions that you can answer in a single post
or you can help them only in a live chat because they don’t know what the problem is so you have to go be like a doctor which asks the right questions.
you can discuss stuff more quickly and be more up to date then stack overflow where you still have answers for meteor 0.6.1 which would not work for meteor 1.x
and the black hole sentence i wont comment… i commented it in the black hole…
There are over a dozen different Meteor chats now, that’s ok, but we’re trying to keep the IRC one maintained. People want to use other channels that’s fine, we’re just looking to give those that remain in IRC the tools to maintain it.
this is NOT a thread about if we need irc or not !
There are many many questions every day
this is a thread about OP rights on the ACTIVE!!! #meteor chan on freenode
if nobody would care about freenode the chan would be empty and there would be no questions
nobody is really advertising that chan and we still get a lot of user so again
this is not about if we need irc or not!
ps: your invite page does not work. after entering my email i get this: Failed! missing_scope
Some people may prefer Slack or Facebook, but for others IRC is a natural environment that Slack will never be.
The #meteor channel is alive with plenty of questions everyday. Most of them don’t fit the Stack Overflow schema. It’s not that rare for Meteor questions to get downvotes on SO.
Also, IRC is a good place for people to get to know other Meteor devs of a more friendly basis than forums.
But like @lampe said, the point is, we don’t ask people to drop other places and come to IRC. We ask for the tools to maintain the running channel.
It’s a sad day indeed when people shun a non-profit, open source and publicly accessible service that has served developers well for over a decade in favor of a proprietary, invite orientated, for-profit service that hasn’t been around for 5 minutes.
I’m confused. There is an active, vibrant part of the community and they bring up the topic of volunteering and in response they are told this part of the community is not as valuable as others?
Please reconsider. IRC may not be the most easily accessible, but especially veteran developers and tech savvy folks hang around there and it would be a waste to leave it to the bots and spammers. There should be operators available in the channel. If MDG decides to provide them, great. But even better if these guys and gals can focus on making meteor even more awesome and the community volunteers show the world that no developer with questions is left to the bots.
So I’ve been in the IRC channel for almost 3 years now and I’ve seen people come and gone but at some level it’s always been active and there’s always been a good feeling in the channel with people being friendly and not just answering RTFM to every newcomer.
This isn’t going to get replaced by the next new thing, the other things will just be new and different communication channels. I like IRC and Gitter and Slack and the Forums (not much of a forum guy), and I use it all to try and find like-minded people and to get help, and sometimes even to help out
It would be much appreciated if some of the more active/loyal irc users could get some op statuses, the channel has always been clean and good. However since 1.0 hit the channel have been growing and I’ve seen some more stuff that could have most likely been mitigated with some op statues.
This isn’t about which communication channel is better to do whatever, but about a communication channel that is actively being used and not moderated.
+1 for the opinions above, as a newcomer I can attest that the IRC channel really is a friendly and helpful place. Would be a real shame to ignore that part of Meteor community. Ops for @zimme, mesays!
for this. I’m happy to help out, although any of the users mentioned by ciwolsey, and I would say zimme (z1mme) too.
There is no request for IRC being an officially supported part of the community, but to allow the users who reside there better ability to support each other.
Having looked at the access list for the channel, would we be able to get a response from @debergalis or @gschmidt as they have founder-level access and would be able to make any changes required.
I am also of the opinion that we need to do something for the folks at the #meteor channel. I don’t think it is a community that can be ignored any longer. Right now there are approximately 225 people sitting in there and there are questions all day long. This is no small community. Granted, this population is a third of what a channel like #angularjs or #reactjs has currently. However, in comparison, both #angularjs and #reactjs have active administration, “answer bots” which help with simple question and documentation, and channel logs. With these sorts of services #meteor would be just as popular and just as helpful to the community.
supermario makes two statements above. The first is absolutely true. When questions don’t get answered on IRC they can posted here in the forum or on StackOverflow and get answered. The second statement does not need to be true. He says “When questions do get answered on IRC, they enter a black hole. Nobody else benefits. Everyone loses.” I am sorry, but a well run IRC community does not need to be that way. We have nearly 3 decades of experience with managing IRC channels under our belt. Channel discussion does not need to be a black hole. We can keep logs of interactions and even automatically aggregate commonly asked questions to keep the community up to date.
With that said, I might be missing some history here. Has MDG said they want nothing to do with IRC? I mean, there is an existing bot which logs into the #meteor channel and updates every time someone checks into the git project.
This might be a time where we need to just stand up and act. Let’s make a channel bot for #meteor and give it the functionality that it needs to help the community and the channel operators to succeed. Let’s start running the channel the way it is meant to be run. Then, once we have shown a bit of progress, let’s get the current channel owners (n1mmy, deberg, gschmidt) and show them that this is an important part of the community. Why ask for permissions when we basically have the full rights to just handle what we need right now? Sure, having operator status is a helpful tool for banning bots and for changing statuses. But really, let’s show value then let’s act to change the policy.
Hello - thanks everybody for your patience, it’s been quite a busy week.
It’s true - we’ve traditionally given preference to the forums and SO over IRC. This is mainly because they’re searchable, which is great for people who may need to find help in the future.
However, I appreciate what you guys have said re: the benefits of synchronous chat and that IRC is open source. I’m willing to empower community members to make the IRC experience better.
If you’re interested in being a part of that, e-mail me at nickcoe@meteor.com and we’ll chat more.
for this. I’m happy to help out, although any of the users mentioned by ciwolsey, and I would say zimme (z1mme) too.