eHi everyone,
1. Drop RocketChat? While I don't know the details that have led to this, I am aware that things at RocketChat have been moving in an unfavorable direction for quite some time, so I blindly support dropping it.
2. Reverse engineer/import database? I am strongly against any reverse engineering. The database contains sensitive data (private messages) and I would not give consent to anybody to start messing with it. The purpose of a persistent chat is to not require people to be online 24/7 so they can get an answer but to support asynchronous communication, and that's about it. It should be dropped and not kept or archived.
3. Alternatives? While I am really interested to hear about more alternatives, my current mindset is "convince me that anything can beat a self-hosted Matrix“. It's not perfect but I don't think that anything else comes as close to suiting our needs as this. In general, this topic deserves a longer high-bandwidth discussion that needs to touch on the fundamentals: is this chat for us as in "project members", i.e. "the people who work here" and need a tool to communicate and coordinate or is it for users so they can ask for help? Because I don't think we can have it both ways and still make everybody happy with our choice. And I have some other controversial ideas.
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) I'll skip this for now.
5. Any other comments? I'll setup Matrix at home and check the anonymous/public access thing.
René
Am 19.01.2024 um 23:27 schrieb Martin Owens doctormo@geek-2.com:
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 ==
- 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.
- 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?
- What replacement chat systems have you used with other projects
that you think might be a good fit for our use cases? (see below)
- Can you expand upon our use cases with the ways you current use, or
know that our rocket chat is being used? (see below)
- 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 _______________________________________________ Inkscape Devel mailing list -- inkscape-devel@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-devel-leave@lists.inkscape.org