[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[André Pönitz]

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 05:03:24PM +0200, Ulf Hermann wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The problematic point is "lots of better options". We need to agree on
> one thing here, and it should be something that doesn't shut down
> tomorrow. Maybe you can share some of the options that people already use.
> 
> Considering that IRC, being all plain text with rather weak
> authentication, was enough so far, I don't think privacy is such a big
> deal here.

Funnily enough, the only _forced_ privacy problem with IRC is that you
have to disclose your IP and that's hard to avoid for technical reason.

> The most important thing are the public channels and those
> are, well, not private.

"Privacy" is not (only) about what you say, it's also about who you
are and what you did last summer.

No registration means gives the possibility to avoid building up
profiles, even in public communication. If you want one, fine, you
can have that too.

> Barrier to entry should indeed be lower than IRC, and for me that means
> there shouldn't be an elaborate registration procedure.

There shouldn't be _any_ mandatory registration.

And now since we are on it: Can someone please remove the +r from #qt ?
All other #qt-* channels at FreeNode are fine without.

Andre'