Chapel: Alternative communication platform to IRC

[ben-albrecht]

Chapel currently supports 2 IRC channels: #chapel and #chapel-developers.

We have been considering an alternative real-time communication platform more modern than IRC. This issue is meant to capture alternatives that we might consider and their pluses and minuses. (This is the chat-equivalent of #6440).

This issue was created following the discussion in this chapel-users thread.

Criteria

Some criteria to be considered:

• Ease of access
  
  
  
  • What kind of account is necessary to chat, or view logs?
  
  
  • Will users likely already have an account or will they need to create one?
  
  
• Logging
  
  
  
  • What are the limitations of archive storage?
  
  
• Searchability of chat logs
• IRC Integration
  
  
  
  • We would prefer not to split the community and maintain multiple chat rooms on multiple platforms.
  
  
• Notifications

Platforms

Gitter

• Example
  
  
  
  • https://gitter.im/rust-lang/rust
  
  
• Ease of access
  
  
  
  • Requires GitHub or Twitter account to chat
  
  
  • No account required to view logs
  
  
• Logging
  
  
  
  • Archived by date
  
  
• Searchability of chat logs
  
  
  
  • Searching logs requires logging in, but seems functional
  
  
• IRC Integration
  
  
  
  • irc-bridge provided by Gitter
  
  
• Notifications
  
  
  
  • Seems pretty flexible
  
  

Slack

• Example
  
  
  
  • N/A (requires invite to access a channel)
  
  
• Ease of access
  
  
  
  • Requires an invite from someone in the channel, and creation of a Slack account.
  
  
  • Integrations like slackin can make it easy for someone to get auto-invites to a team
  
  
  • Account required to view channel / logs
  
  
• Logging
  
  
  
  • Archives and viewable by scrolling up or searching
  
  
  • Multiple channels may make it easier to keep different categories of discussions organized in archives
  
  
• Searchability of chat logs
  
  
  
  • Seems pretty good
  
  
• IRC Integration
  
  
  
  • irc-bridge developed externally
  
  
• Notifications
  
  
  
  • Seems pretty flexible
  
  

chat.stackexchange.com

• Example
  
  
  
  • Python Bit Shavers
  
  
  • I do not see any examples of PL chatrooms
  
  
  • The above is a channel dedicated to code golfing in python
  
  
• Ease of access
  
  
  
  • No account required to view logs
  
  
  • Requires Stack Overflow account with at least 20 points to participate
  
  
• Logging
  
  
  
  • Archives and viewable by scrolling up or searching
  
  
• Searchability of chat logs
  
  
  
  • Seems pretty good
  
  
• IRC Integration
  
  
  
  • Solutions exist, but are experimental at best
  
  
• Notifications
  
  
  
  • Notification rules
  
  
  • I don't see any options for configuring notifications
  
  

[ben-albrecht]

This is a work in progress - I plan to capture some of the discussion and resources mentioned from the chapel-users thread into this issue description.

[ben-albrecht]

chat.stackexchange's lack of IRC support and barrier of entry makes it a poor contender in my opinion. Additionally, there is a lack of precedent for programming languages using it as a chat platform.

The article @buddha314 mentioned does a pretty good comparison of Gitter vs. Slack.

I am currently leaning towards Gitter, primarily because it has a lower barrier of entry and is viewable by anyone without an account.

[ben-albrecht]

Pinging those who were involved in the original discussion: @nimitbhardwaj, @russel, @buddha314, @ty1027, and @bradcray

[buddha314]

I don't mean this in a bad way, but I think this has turned into a bit of a beauty contest. At ISEF we* start by picking strong winner candidates then moving down the line. This works pretty well.

With that in mind, the first winner I propose is Gitter. Who else has a candidate for 1st Place?

[* I'm a Grand Jury Award Judge in Bioinformatics / Computational Biology]

[bradcray]

I like what I've seen from Gitter as well and would be interested in firing up a Chapel channel, having a few of us sit on it for a few days, and see whether anything about it strikes us as awful before pulling the plug on IRC and working on migrating people over there.

[ben-albrecht]

pulling the plug on IRC and working on migrating people over there

The IRC-bridge would allow us to merge the IRC channel with the Gitter channel, by transmitting messages between Gitter and IRC via a bot. However, we would have to choose an IRC channel to merge (my preference being #chapel), and could consider pulling the plug on the other.

[bradcray]

What's the advantage of doing this over just shutting down the IRC channels? Feels a bit like lugging deadweight along with us if Gitter has now downsides relative to IRC...

[ben-albrecht]

What's the advantage of doing this over just shutting down the IRC channels?

There may be some people who still prefer to use IRC...

XKCD references aside, I am not opposed to closing the IRC channels. However, it would require a trivial amount of effort to continue supporting one of them if we chose to do so.

[buddha314]

Chapel channel, having a few of us sit on it for a few days,

Let me know and I'll jump on in the next hour. The current IRC is pretty quiet, so it may be hard to beta-test. "Try-before-you-buy" is usually a good idea.

[buddha314]

This might smell enough like IRC for some: https://github.com/RodrigoEspinosa/gitter-cli I kinda like the ytalk thing!

[nimitbhardwaj]

Hey, I think we add Gitter chat and IRC both active for some days, then slowly migration will be easy.

[nimitbhardwaj]

So whats the status

[buddha314]

Looks like @victor-ludorum started a room on Gitter, I just jumped in but nobody is there. My user name is buddha314, here is my GitHub https://github.com/buddha314 so if a more "official" chat room starts, invite me.

[nimitbhardwaj]

my username is https://github.com/nimitbhardwaj, please invite me too, if this is ready

[ben-albrecht]

Looks like @victor-ludorum started a room on Gitter,

That was created by a previous Chapel developer. I believe the official Gitter channel will be at https://gitter.im/chapel-lang/chapel when it is created. WIll update here if/when we open that.

[buddha314]

I don't mean to sound pushy, but I feel that threads like this stay open way too long. Unless we know what we need to know to make a decision, we never will. For instance: "If 50%+ of the active community say yes to X, it's X". Right now, we don't appear to have a go-no-go criteria to work against.

[victor-ludorum]

Yeah!! @buddha314 it was not made by me . Actually I have also jumped in that with the same confusion which you have .

[buddha314]

I'm constantly confused by the computer machines.

So I'm going to say my vote is Gitter, should anyone care.

[Tshimanga]

A new chapel user but I'd vote Gitter too... though I imagine you could pick randomly among the presented options and still reap copius benefits regardless

[ben-albrecht]

We have opened https://gitter.im/chapel-lang/chapel as a trial run for now.

[bradcray]

So far, gitter seems nice to me. I find myself wondering whether there's any way for a Mac user to generate/customize sounds when things are happening on it (signs point to "no"). And if not, I think I'd like to try hooking up the IRC bot so that I can continue to get sounds through Adium (at which point I'll likely switch over to a Gitter Window to respond when I'm interested).

[buddha314]

I'm about to try this app and I'll let you know if I hear sounds. Ghostly sounds...

[ben-albrecht]

I find myself wondering whether there's any way for a Mac user to generate/customize sounds when things are happening on it (signs point to "no").

You might be able to add an extension/add-on to play a sound when receiving a web notification. I found one for Firefox, but am not seeing anything for Chrome..

[bradcray]

@ben-albrecht: Sounds like a big hammer for something that'd be nice to customize on a per-app basis. Are you open to setting up the bot to see if it helps with the lack of sound issue? What's the level of effort?

[daviditen]

I've been using this to watch the gitter in Adium with all the normal Adium alerts. The only problems I've had so far are:

• It seems to have missed a few messages on the first night that I set it up.
• When I post a message using a web browser, I don't see my own message in Adium.

[ben-albrecht]

find myself wondering whether there's any way for a Mac user to generate/customize sounds when things are happening on it (signs point to "no")

Apparently the Windows and Linux clients have this feature. There is an open feature request for sound notification on OS X, but it has been inactive for over a year. Maybe it could use a ping...

Are you open to setting up the bot to see if it helps with the lack of sound issue? What's the level of effort?

👍 Shouldn't be hard to set up. Will attempt and let you know how it goes.

[ben-albrecht]

Shouldn't be hard to set up.

Famous last words.

This turned out to be more effort than I was willing to spend (mostly due to setting up hosting of the bot).

[ben-albrecht]

I am closing this issue as we have adopted https://gitter.im/chapel-lang/chapel as our communication platform, and have deprecated the IRC channel.

[bradcray]

For those who read the last few posts and are disappointed that Ben didn't set up an IRC bot, the solution David Iten pointed to above has been working well for me from an IRC client. It's not perfect, but it gives me what I want (specifically lots of control over what noises are generated when from my IRC client since Gitter's didn't have much control last I looked at it; and the ability to communicate with the Gitter channel without using their client if I want to).