ZooKeeper Chat

[Abraham Fine <af...@apache.org>]

Hello-

I believe having a healthy chat platform could be great for the
community and increase engagement for both developers and users. 

Currently ZooKeeper has an IRC channel on freenode but it does not seem
to be heavily used right now. I think this may be related to IRC's
shortcomings, primarily the difficulty in keeping state between chat
sessions and a high barrier to entry for new users.

So I think it may be valuable for us to explore some other options. 

Slack (https://slack.com) seems to be the popular choice these days but
it does not natively support open signups (being able to just click a
link on a web  page and join a room rather that getting an invitation
beforehand) without some hacky tools (https://github.com/rauchg/slackin)
 and the free tier has a limited search history.

Gitter (https://gitter.im) is also popular for open source projects and
ties auth to GitHub. It is free with unlimited users and message
history.

Mattermost (https://about.mattermost.com) appears to be a great open
source solution that we would need to self host. It has desktop and
mobile clients that should make using it easy. 

There are also a couple of solutions on top of IRC such as 
http://ircv3.net and https://www.irccloud.com but I am not very familiar
with them.

It would be great to hear what everyone thinks. Are things fine as they
are right now or is it worth exploring another chat solution?

Thanks,
Abe

Re: ZooKeeper Chat

[Michael Han <ha...@cloudera.com>]

Personally I'd give gitter a shot. There're Apache projects use it already
[1][2].

We also have IRC #zookeeper, there are quite a few folks there but the
channel is really quite, and IRC has some problems that gitter (and other
"modern" tools) has addressed.

[1] https://gitter.im/apacheignite/ignite
[2] https://gitter.im/apache/taverna

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:07 PM, Abraham Fine <af...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hello-
>
> I believe having a healthy chat platform could be great for the
> community and increase engagement for both developers and users.
>
> Currently ZooKeeper has an IRC channel on freenode but it does not seem
> to be heavily used right now. I think this may be related to IRC's
> shortcomings, primarily the difficulty in keeping state between chat
> sessions and a high barrier to entry for new users.
>
> So I think it may be valuable for us to explore some other options.
>
> Slack (https://slack.com) seems to be the popular choice these days but
> it does not natively support open signups (being able to just click a
> link on a web  page and join a room rather that getting an invitation
> beforehand) without some hacky tools (https://github.com/rauchg/slackin)
>  and the free tier has a limited search history.
>
> Gitter (https://gitter.im) is also popular for open source projects and
> ties auth to GitHub. It is free with unlimited users and message
> history.
>
> Mattermost (https://about.mattermost.com) appears to be a great open
> source solution that we would need to self host. It has desktop and
> mobile clients that should make using it easy.
>
> There are also a couple of solutions on top of IRC such as
> http://ircv3.net and https://www.irccloud.com but I am not very familiar
> with them.
>
> It would be great to hear what everyone thinks. Are things fine as they
> are right now or is it worth exploring another chat solution?
>
> Thanks,
> Abe
>



-- 
Cheers
Michael.