The purpose of this room is too discuss the present state and future plans regarding the official chat rooms of the wiki.
Current Status
Discord
First things first: Discord is running swimmingly. I moved everything important (rules, channel overview, the privacy-focused access thingy) over here and configure the Widget. Whilst the behind the scenes is still a terrible mess, it continues to be the main go-to place for most people.
IRC
How is #base-six doing? I just checked in on the IRC1, and there were only two people in there, Hexick and "Chav", with not much action going on. Am I right to assume it is basically dead? I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to keep the IRC when it is not used. It served well, but perhaps it's time to retire now, especially since it's apparently hosted at an domain outside our control.
Future Plans
The future plans are source from a certain "Agent Smith": Bots and Matrix. Also, more cross-wiki integration, but that requires some innovations here too, especially in the field of announcing and previewing articles. And last but not least updating policy and making contingencies.
Matrix
We should explore setting up a community using Matrix. Matrix is rather privacy friendly2 and less intrusive than most alternatives. At the same time, the wide variety of clients means it provides a User Experience befitting the 202th decade, even for our not so tech-savvy users. But the most important thing is the support for bridges to other services — it is possible to intertwine the Matrix community with our already existing Discord server (and potentially IRC) in a way that makes them become for all practical purposes one. This would counteract fracturing the community whilst widening access.
The current plan would progress as follows:
- Set up a matrix room for coordination.
This can be done by me alone, but as this step provides everyone unfamiliar to the service the chance to get some experience and gauge matrix suitability for our needs, I'd love to see some participation. You're being voluntold. - Bridge a test room on Matrix to a test channel on our Discord server.
I'm currently eyeing t2bot to do the bridging, but if that doesn't works, we have alternatives to probe. - Decide on a homeserver for the community.
Ideally, we would host one ourselves, but that seems outside our reach as of now (vis infra). I think unredacted.org would be a fitting name to host us (also, the organization behind it is okay) but again, there is an entire phase dedicated to sorting this permanent decision out, so there is no need for haste right now. - Make a doppelgänger of our Discord server and bridge it.
- Promote the resulting unholy amalgamation of services and write proper explanations and introduction on the wiki.
Bots
With the exceptions of Discord's in-house Pronoun Picker bot, the Discord server is currently botless. Automating things could greatly cut back on administrative overhead and unlock new potentials, so this option should be investigated further.
- Create a PRD for the bot(s):
We know that we want one, and probably need on too, but which functionality is required? Many thing to consider, like: automatically assigning roles, fetching the wiki's RSS feed and displaying it, mManaging the time zones table for users, etc. - Evaluate existing bots at their fitness for these tasks
Discord has a vivid ecosystem of bots already which have to be considered regarding their usability and alignment to our values
If no bot(s) satisfying our needs exist, we'll have to develop one ourselves. Besides the standards issues of setting up a git, creating viable code and arguing about codestyle and language, this would also leave us with one burning question: Where to host the bot. I don't see us currently in a position that would allow us to reliable have our own server to host stuff on, and even if we were to rent hosting space somewhere, that still requires money that somebody (not me) would have to pay.
Preparing for the worst
Finally, we should make some back-up plans in case if various adversities that could affect our chat rooms. I think the current rules should cover the worst and I can't identify and credible inside-threats besides myself, but we should not get lazy on those domains either. The main concern however comes from the outside: what happens if some outside force attempts to harass and raid our chat rooms? Besides dedicated raiding communities and dumb bots, there is always the threat that some confic-adjacent community suddenly decides to pay us a visit. If it's because of some perceived offence, we have to deal with loads of brigading of people with, ahem, varying levels of competence at disruption, whereas even friendly visitors (imagine a popular content creator covering us or even promoting us) could overwhelm our current capacities by sheer mass alone.
Anything else?
This wraps it up for now. Any input is of course greatly appreciated. And yes, this is entirely serious, as blown out of proportion as it might seem. Stagnation is regress, and the off-wiki community are our most precious resource.
Eschew elucidation, espouse obfuscation.
