Do *something* about Gitter

[jducoeur]

Over on the Scala Contributors forum, the point came up that spammers are occasionally infesting Gitter channels. I don't see an immediate crisis -- there have definitely been some roaming bots, but nothing terribly immediate -- but in principle we shouldn't have completely unmonitored and unmaintained channels out there.

So I'd say that we should either:

• Update ourselves to be able to maintain those channels (at the least, some of us newer members of the Steering Committee, and/or other responsible volunteers, should be given appropriate admin powers), or
• Acknowledge that the channels are truly dead, and archive them.

I'm not particularly attached to which direction we choose (and I'm willing to check in there occasionally, if I'm given the power to do something about it), but the current state of affairs isn't great.

(None of this is unique to us -- the same is true for a variety of Scala channels -- but the ones under "typelevel" are our responsibility.)

[rossabaker]

I don't know whether the resurgence in interest is related to the unofficial Matrix room that spun up a few days ago, but a few of us were reminiscing about Gitter this weekend, so this info is still in RAM.

Most old Gitter rooms are now two Matrix channels, with a cutover in late 2020 or early 2021. The older one is read-only and generally has more content. The newer channel links to the older¹, and can be joined with any Matrix account or the old Gitter logins (they still work!). GitHub admins as of early 2023 are channel moderators via their gitter.im identity. They stopped syncing permissions as one of the final stages in the Matrix migration.

There is no longer a public directory of these rooms, but I'm still in dozens, and more can be found via archive.org. The rooms are still wonderful primary sources for project histories. I have a blog post in progress with a table of channel pairs.²

I do not have any interest in actively moderating abandoned channels. I happen to be a moderator on most of these rooms, and could restrict posting to moderators, effectively archiving them. I don't anticipate we'd choose Gitter as the homeserver if Matrix is what's next, but these permission changes would be reversible.

Footnotes

1. scroll all the way up or go to the channel advanced settings ↩

2. AI crawlers fuck off ↩

[rossabaker]

I needed a low-challenge activity, so I removed the Telegram spam and banned the perpetrators on http4s/http4s, typelevel/cats, and typelevel/cats-effect. I haven't flipped any other bits.

If the Moderation Team wants to take over or be backup, a Matrix account on any server will do.

[jducoeur]

Wow, been a long time since I've looked at Matrix.

I'm not formally part of the Mod Team, but happy to be added as a backup -- I've just reactivated my old toy @jducoeur:matrix.org account, which will do as an identity for now. (I also have my Gitter identity, but at this point I don't really see any advantage to that one over the easier-to-remember matrix.org one.)