[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Kai Köhne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Jason H
> Sent: Wednesday, 19 May 2021 17:26
> To: giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com
> Cc: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC
> 
> Aren't all the kids these days moving to Discord? Slack is inefficient as the history is rolling unless you pay for more.
> 
> I would worry about moving it under Digia (tQtCo), because I'd expect them to encumber the access to it(paywall, ads, tracking, etc*). I don't trust them.

TQtC (my employer) already runs all the critical infrastructure for the Qt Project, as well as employing a large part of the developers. But running a chat server ... no, that would require too much trust.

> Perhaps the KDE people would operate the Discord infrastructure?
>
> * Before you laugh, and say that is crazy, consider that the online Qt Docs search results now have ads: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/search-results.html?q=camera shows 4 ads for me.  And I don't know of any other toolkit who serves their documentation with ads. Take for example mozdev: 
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=camera shows 0 ads. React, 0 ads. I figure it's only a matter of time until the actual documentation pages have ads too. (There may be good reasons for ads, but it's still not a good look.)

It's true that the embedded search on doc.qt.io sometimes shows ads. But it's not the result of evil TQtC making heaps of money with ads. It's just a side-effect of using google for embedded search, and has been like that since years (if not decades)  ... We have actually recently started to look into it (again), see https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTWEBSITE-723 if you want to get updates.

Can we agree to keep the bashing out of this channel?

Thanks

Kai