Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

As a quick feedback: Gitter doesn't seem to be mature enough, so that
those of us who kept testing it (for about three weeks) would want to
use it in the long run.

* The Android app constantly keeps crashing.
* Even if it is not crashing, I wasn't able to configure it to get
notifications when a new message arrived that I would want to see it.
* Browser updates sometimes work, sometimes not. Very often one needs
to keep refreshing the browser and hope that something works
(sometimes the contents disappears completely).
* Channels are very tightly bound to git repositories, but unless you
sell your soul to the plugin, it seems hard to configure it properly,
and we never got it working once we migrated the github repository to
a different address (not that we tried that hard, but we did try).
* Functionality is very limited.
* No topics.
* I was subscribed to another channel with heavy traffic that I'm not
really interested in that much other than maybe checking it once per
week. Once I allowed notifications from the app (I did that under
Windows) to be able to respond to the student faster, I started being
bombarded with messaged from the other channel, and I was unable to
silence them until I completely removed the channel. And even then I
kept getting email two days later about the new posts in that channel.
* Receiving a bunch of emails reminding me of content that I have
already read two days ago.

While it is very easy to initially set up, it is just not yet worth
considering as a serious platform to "replace" our official
communication channel.

What should we try next?

Mojca

On Wed, 15 May 2019 at 01:54, Umesh Singla wrote:
>
> I remember seeing Gitter.im being used by more than a usual number of open source communities in the past. While I am personally fine with Github Issues/PRs and emails, a chat-like application does come in handy for quick replies.
>
> I logged in just now to my old account from over 2 years back and I see no limits on the messages. You can sign in with Github/Twitter. There is this idea of community and rooms like IRC, and while anyone can read the community messages by visiting the link, one needs to sign in to talk. It's linked to a Github organization and owners of the organization act like admins. It also allows for one-on-one conversations and rooms where only invited users can join.
>
> An example would be: https://gitter.im/coala/coala
>
> @Mojca would you be willing to give this https://gitter.im/macports-gsoc a try? I tried creating one suitable for us. Let me know if you are able to see the secret room. :)
>
> Thanks,
> Umesh