Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Jackson Isaac]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 8:04 AM Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
>
> 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?
>

Alternatives to IRC that I use (at work and tried at other projects)
are Discord, Slack and MS Teams. Not too many options that I have
explored, so did a quick google and found [1].

I would say we can try Riot (also mentioned earlier by Rainer), as I
see lot of pros put up for it in [1]. We can also explore discord as
an option. If none works, we can stick to IRC.

[1] https://www.slant.co/options/4557/alternatives/~irc-alternatives

-- 
Jackson Isaac