Hey everyone,
Inkscape has hosted our own chat services at chat.inkscape.org since 2018, we've been using the open source server RocketChat in order to provide the project communication for both internal use and for interacting with users and answering their questions.
The Rocket Chat upstream organisation has recently become hostile to it's users and admins, developing all sorts of covert design patterns to push self-hosted instances into signing up to expensive per-user licenses and proprietary extensions.
It's also sending information about our server back to rocket chat themselves.
The most recent upgrade has left us with a difficult and problematic path ahead as we can't really continue to use rocket chat as a server software. But this has to be a community wide discussion as the service is the most used internal communication channel and is used by many people and many teams for lots of things.
These are the questions I need you to answer, please reply here or send me a personal email or message with your answers:
== Questionnaire ==
1. Do you think we should move away from rocket chat? This is a nominal question since I don't think we can administratively support it going forwards, but we should know your thoughts anyway.
2. Should we reverse engineer the rocket chat database in order to try and keep the history? There are no known tools of retaining the history and if we move to another chat system, our history will be wiped clean. How is history important to you or the project?
3. What replacement chat systems have you used with other projects that you think might be a good fit for our use cases? (see below)
4. Can you expand upon our use cases with the ways you current use, or know that our rocket chat is being used? (see below)
5. Any other comments?
== Use Case ==
I'm drafting a use case document to guide the decision on what to move towards. This might take us time to develop the solution so don't worry about any rash movement, for now we have time to work through the problem together.
You don't have to edit this document yourself, I'll digest answers where I can, but if you want to have a direct hand in drafting I'm inviting people to go to this document and help out:
https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/FcTg4QsdstnDeMA == Final thoughts ==
Sorry to spring this problem on the project. After talking with Marc about the way rocket chat is behaving and how their upgrade paths are causing us issues, we believe this process needs to start now.
Best Regards, Martin Owens Project Infrastructure Hat