GitLab

Before making decision that has a high cost on the community (e.g. deciding on a single platform, requiring parts of or the whole community to migrate to a new tool), let’s see if we can’t just make the current situation better, with smoother interactions between IRC and Matrix.

Main Complaints from IRC

• Long messages or multi-line messages are truncated and turned into URLs for IRC people, which is extra annoying
• The bridge spams IRC channels with entering/leaving messages when there is a bridge restart
• Replies are common with Matrix, but seem to make the experience terrible on IRC side
• Edits are often interrupting the conversation on IRC side, especially when they happen after a while
• There is no grepable local history on Matrix clients
• There is no centralized view for notifications
• Special characters are not URL encoded for links of uploaded files
• Linking to a Matrix room is cumbersome

Main Complaints from Matrix

• Matrix users often get kicked from some channels, such as the #gnome-design one. This happens when the channel mode is set to +R to prevent spam. Most Matrix users are not registered on IRC, so they are kicked
• Bridged room names are complicated. They are formed as #_gimpnet_#roomname:gnome.org. Making nice aliases is a manual operation so far
• The directory is a bit of a mess right now, some important rooms are missing, some seem not to be in the right category (between gnome.org and bridge sections)
• There is no harmonised moderation. On some historical channels, the bridge is not op and can’t effectively kick/ban users from IRC but only from Matrix
• When somebody on IRC is not registered and tries to PM someone from Matrix, their PM is dropped silently
• History is not available for all rooms bridged from IRC. The bridge created the room with a default setting to not share history
• The bridge seems unreliable regarding who is online or not on IRC side. Sometimes IRC people appear in the members of a room when they are not, and sometimes it’s the opposite