[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Andy Nichols]

Hello,

Rather than just move to another IRC server, we should really take this as an opportunity to move to another chat service as the official Qt Project chat.  IRC has a terrible user experience and is not at all accessible for people who haven't been using it for decades like many of us. It does us a huge disservice when trying to attracting new contributors to point to our IRC.  There are lots of better options out there now (which I see some of you on already), so lets move on already.

Regards,
Andy Nichols    

-----Original Message-----
From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2021 4:18 PM
To: development at qt-project.org
Subject: [Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

Hi,

Freenode, the network that hosts our IRC communities, is in the middle 
of some important community changes. TL;DR: most of the volunteer staff 
resigned in protest with what looks like a sell-out of the network and 
its user data.


You can read some more details here:

https://www.kline.sh/
https://coevoet.fr/freenode.html
https://mniip.com/freenode.txt


While Freenode won't shut down tomorrow morning, this still raises some 
questions whether Qt wants to keep its community there or move to 
another network. (The ex-staff has founded another network, libera, 
where most people are moving.)


Who's in charge of the online Qt communities? What's the process to 
decide about this?


Thanks,
-- 
Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts