freenode vs. oftc

[Steve Gordon]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mike Burns" <mburns at redhat.com>
> To: "Karsten 'quaid' Wade" <kwade at redhat.com>
> Cc: arch at ovirt.org
> Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 8:37:32 PM
> Subject: Re: freenode vs. oftc
> 
> On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 16:05 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> > On 03/12/2012 12:39 PM, Perry Myers wrote:
> > 
> > > We'll keep the #ovirt channel on Freenode open however, if for no
> > > other reason than to redirect folks to the OFTC channel
> > 
> > How about this:
> > 
> > * Keep OFTC as canonical channel.
> > * Ask everyone to also lurk on the Freenode channel.
> > ** By lurking we shorten the time on discussions in this
> > other-major-IRC community.
> > * Allow conversations to flourish on Freenode, but redirect back to
> > OFTC channel.
> > * See what happens over time.
> > 
> > We can have ovirtbot on the Freenode channel, so that channel sees
> > the
> > activity and so forth. This also allows people to turn a discussion
> > in
> > to a meeting simply so they can get a log (and #info, #action,
> > etc.)
> > for sharing with the mailing list later.
> 
> I think I'd much rather have a handful of people lurk in the freenode
> channel and point discussion questions to OFTC.  I think that
> freenode
> has a much larger usage base, so keeping a channel there where we can
> point people to the right place is smart, but I don't know about
> having
> both channels active for discussions.
> 
> IMHO, we should keep all discussions/meetings on the OFTC channel and
> simply redirect people from the freenode channel to OFTC.  We could
> even
> have a join message on the channel that says something like "Thank
> you
> for your interest in the oVirt Project.  Our primary IRC channel is
> #ovirt on OFTC.  Please ask your questions there."

Usually this is done by registering the channel, and setting it up to kick everyone who joins with a kick message indicating where to go/what to do. If you leave any possibility for joining/lurking you end up with two communities for active discussion which in my opinion is far worse that just happening to be on a 'less popular' network.

Steve