Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[Dimitris Chloupis]

Actually your numbers are pretty low

#blendercoders indeed has 187 , but those are the actual C coders working
on the blender source (which I do not do), so its an equivalent of our
phraro-dev, the equivalent of pharo-users is #blender with 360 members and
the #blenderpython with 70 members which are people like me that work on
blender addons using python (all these are online users of course)

BUT the blender community is enormous, its theorised since its
impossible to know for sure that is around 1 million users, both
professional and hobbists. As a result of this the community is highly
fragmanted as all community of similar size are because they are impossible
to be contained.

In Discord I am on 2 blender servers one has 175 online users and the other
75 online users. As such I have little reason anymore to use IRC and
especially Slack (the only thing in Slack of interest to me is Pharo).

Also I am a game developer and Discord has become the default online chat
tool for game developers and gamers aline the same way Slack has become the
default online chat tool for developers.

Unreal server I am using on Discord has over 1200 users online , countless
dedicate channels and a great deal of Unreal game developers use Blender so
for me Discord by far the best choice for what I am doing.

Also a problem with IRC is that you see people that are online but they
never say a word so they are online but always AFK. In Discord if you are
afk there is a yellow icon to indicate that , from what I am seeing people
participating in Discord tend to be far more active than people
participating in IRC.

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 6:46 PM Hilaire  wrote:

> I just saw Blender developers seems to use IRC (#blendercoders @
> irc.freenode.net), 187 users. Ruby too at #ruby 917 users
>
> Le 10/02/2017 à 12:29, Dimitris Chloupis a écrit :
> > e) for personal reason all my favorite software (Blender, Unreal
> > etc) is using it
>
> --
> Dr. Geo
> http://drgeo.eu
>
>
>

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[Hilaire]

I just saw Blender developers seems to use IRC (#blendercoders @
irc.freenode.net), 187 users. Ruby too at #ruby 917 users

Le 10/02/2017 à 12:29, Dimitris Chloupis a écrit :
> e) for personal reason all my favorite software (Blender, Unreal
> etc) is using it

-- 
Dr. Geo
http://drgeo.eu

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[François Stephany]

There is a special price for non-profits organization:

> The Slack for Nonprofits program offers eligible organizations a *free
upgrade* to our Standard plan for teams of up to 250 members. For eligible
teams above that size, we offer an 85% discount on the Standard plan.

With 322 users it means that we still have to pay...

See https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833-Slack-for-Nonprofits
for more information.


On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 1:18 PM, denker  wrote:

>
> >
> >> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as
> really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list
> than what was before just in mailing list.
> >> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing
> model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a
> solution for that.
> >
> > Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?
> >
> It is per active member… which is defined as “has logged in the last 14
> days”. We have 322 members. No idea how many
> are active according to that definition.
>
> Fot 322 it would be: $8 per user per month. Which means $2576 per month or
> $25772 per year (taking the special yearly price into account).
>
> Marcus
>
>
>

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[denker]

> 
>> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as 
>> really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list 
>> than what was before just in mailing list.
>> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model 
>> is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for 
>> that.
> 
> Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?
> 
It is per active member… which is defined as “has logged in the last 14 days”. 
We have 322 members. No idea how many
are active according to that definition.

Fot 322 it would be: $8 per user per month. Which means $2576 per month or 
$25772 per year (taking the special yearly price into account).

Marcus

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[Dimitris Chloupis]

I have been pushing for Discord because

a) There is no need to host and maintain as Esteban said
b) There a ton of communities already using it and its by far the second
most mature chat client after Slack
c) It has a very powerful Python API yes I know I know its no Pharo
but still it makes it very easy to make bots that automate a lot of staff.
I am using a bot that fetches RSS feeds (Although not sure how well this is
working) connects to the reddit forum and of course fetches git commits
d) The team listens to its users
e) for personal reason all my favorite software (Blender, Unreal etc)
is using it

I am also making my own bot . I  could try to add a way for the bot to
connect the mailing list with the Discord channel turn the mailing lists
discussions to Discord discussions and vice versa but I have not done this
before so no promises. I do have find a website that turns pretty much
anything to webhooks which is what Discord uses (probably Slack too)

https://ifttt.com/discover

I could do the same with Slack , meaning to send Slack messages to Discord
and Discord to Slack, I think I found one bot that already does this.

In short we can unite everything under one roof and let people keep using
whatever people feel comfortable with (Slack, mailing lists, world.st
forum, reddit , google hangouts , youtube , github and anything with
webhooks or some form of web API)

Also the Bot could store its own log even in the unlikely scenario of a
nuclear explosion in Discord servers we wont lose our valuable data. Though
I think I saw somewhere that Discord allows to backup and export the data
so that may be proven unnecessary.

On the other hand I will have to find a way to host my bot , but that is
not a big deal , the bot is a simple python application and there are a ton
of websites which offer hosting for python applications for free.

Its getting there but will need time.

Also my library Atlas can be used to access the APIs of all these chat
software, Slack and Discord included, because Atlas allows you to use
python libraries from inside Pharo. So its possible to have tools in the
image for those of you that you love never having to leave the image that
take advantage of these technologies. I wont be doing this though because
a) porting APIs is a project by itself b) most of the code I find is python
code and that makes it an easy copy paste approach (the vast majority of it
is GPL or MIT licensed)

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[p...@highoctane.be]

I am frustated by this too and indeed we need a way to keep the messages.

I am about done with my wrapping of LibStrophe in Pharo with , which
provides a XMPP/Jabber client to Pharo.

So, if someone can activate the XMPP gateway on our Slack instance, we will
have a way to archive the contents (and possibly post a kind of digest into
a mailing list).

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP

Phil

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 11:42 AM, Esteban Lorenzano 
wrote:

>
> > On 10 Feb 2017, at 11:28, Serge Stinckwich 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Esteban Lorenzano 
> wrote:
> >> Hi Stephan,
> >>
> >>> On 10 Feb 2017, at 10:27, Stephan Eggermont  wrote:
> >>>
> >>> The past year we have started using Slack to communicate in real-time
> about Pharo. It has nice (mobile) clients and makes it easy to share
> pictures and snippets. As a result a large part of the communication about
> design and how to do things has moved from the mailing lists to Slack. As
> we're using the free version, and cannot afford to use the commercial
> version, we have no long-time storage of the design discussions. This
> contrasts with our mailing lists, that have a long-term archive. There was
> some discussion about this, and I'm not aware of that resulting in an
> accessible, easy to access archive. Also, we have not succeeded in
> summarizing design discussions from slack to the mailing lists. The
> resulting gap in design information forms an enormous long-term risk for
> our community. Without the design discussions it is much more difficult to
> later understand why decisions were taken. We cannot afford to let this
> short-term ease-of-use destroy Pharo's community history, and thereby
> Pharo. Let us fix this.
> >
> > Yes I agree with your concerns.
> >
> >> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as
> really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list
> than what was before just in mailing list.
> >> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing
> model is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a
> solution for that.
> >
> > Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?
>
> yes it is.
> Is just not prepared for open source communities like ours.
>
> >
> >> Last days we were experimenting with @kilon again on use discord as a
> substitute and I find that for now it works really well and with a bit of
> work we can have all what you want: discord incorporated a search function
> (and they do not have the 10k limit) and we could do a bot that logs
> everything that happens there and stores that into gists (or whatever, but
> gists seems like a good idea).
> >>
> >> With this we would have enhanced the availability of those discussions
> (it remains the fact that immediate communication is worst organised than
> mails, but well… we need to try)
> >
> > and move all the community on discord ?
>
> this is what I would like to propose, because...
>
> > Or use an open-source slack
>
> the problem with this is that we have to host it… and then is more
> problems for maintenance, etc.
>
> Esteban
>
> > like : https://about.mattermost.com/
> > and host our own chat server.
> >
> > --
> > Serge Stinckwich
> > UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
> > Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
> > http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/
> >
>
>
>

Re: [Pharo-dev] [Pharo-users] Slack, fragmentation and design information

[Esteban Lorenzano]

> On 10 Feb 2017, at 11:28, Serge Stinckwich  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Esteban Lorenzano  
> wrote:
>> Hi Stephan,
>> 
>>> On 10 Feb 2017, at 10:27, Stephan Eggermont  wrote:
>>> 
>>> The past year we have started using Slack to communicate in real-time about 
>>> Pharo. It has nice (mobile) clients and makes it easy to share pictures and 
>>> snippets. As a result a large part of the communication about design and 
>>> how to do things has moved from the mailing lists to Slack. As we're using 
>>> the free version, and cannot afford to use the commercial version, we have 
>>> no long-time storage of the design discussions. This contrasts with our 
>>> mailing lists, that have a long-term archive. There was some discussion 
>>> about this, and I'm not aware of that resulting in an accessible, easy to 
>>> access archive. Also, we have not succeeded in summarizing design 
>>> discussions from slack to the mailing lists. The resulting gap in design 
>>> information forms an enormous long-term risk for our community. Without the 
>>> design discussions it is much more difficult to later understand why 
>>> decisions were taken. We cannot afford to let this short-term ease-of-use 
>>> destroy Pharo's community history, and thereby Pharo. Let us fix this.
> 
> Yes I agree with your concerns.
> 
>> I share many of what you say… but in the other point of view, Slack as 
>> really worked and there is a lot more happening now in Slack + mailing list 
>> than what was before just in mailing list.
>> But most of that is lost because of Slack policies (also Slack pricing model 
>> is impossible for a community as ours), and we need to find a solution for 
>> that.
> 
> Yes this is too expensive for the Pharo consortium ?

yes it is. 
Is just not prepared for open source communities like ours.

> 
>> Last days we were experimenting with @kilon again on use discord as a 
>> substitute and I find that for now it works really well and with a bit of 
>> work we can have all what you want: discord incorporated a search function 
>> (and they do not have the 10k limit) and we could do a bot that logs 
>> everything that happens there and stores that into gists (or whatever, but 
>> gists seems like a good idea).
>> 
>> With this we would have enhanced the availability of those discussions (it 
>> remains the fact that immediate communication is worst organised than mails, 
>> but well… we need to try)
> 
> and move all the community on discord ?

this is what I would like to propose, because...

> Or use an open-source slack

the problem with this is that we have to host it… and then is more problems for 
maintenance, etc.

Esteban

> like : https://about.mattermost.com/
> and host our own chat server.
> 
> -- 
> Serge Stinckwich
> UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
> Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
> http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/
>