We also have an IRC channel: http://www.wlug.org/participate.html Internet Relay Chat Join the realtime chat on our IRC channel. Connect your IRC client to irc.freenode.net Join the #wlug-ma channel or join directly from this link: irc://irc.freenode.net/#wlug-ma. See more information about Freenode and join the chat from your web browser but maybe IRC is too old school--no one chats on it anymore. On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 04:03:14PM -0500, Joshua Stone via WLUG wrote:
Hey all,
Last night's meeting was excellent, and I'd like say thanks again to Tim for giving me a ride home!
Last night's discussion gave me ideas of ways we could improve general activity, increase attendence, and improve outreach efforts. Hosting a meetup.com group would be certainly improve discoverability, and getting in touch with WPI's computer science group would be great too.
I think what a lot communities are doing nowadays is having a text chat format for users who want to communicate more easily over the internet, especially with mobile devices. As an example, there are Discord servers for Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc, and they have room sizes generally in the hundreds or even well over a thousand. Even before Discord they'd use IRC for providing support, posting updates, etc.
Having a text chat of our own would certainly help improve participation -- I think Matrix would be a good option here because it has many nice features and has a fairly polished user experience:
- Numerous clients available on desktop, mobile, and web ( https://matrix.org/clients/ - Persistent chat history - Link previews - Various bots to choose from for adding functionality ( https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bots/ - User moderation - Server federation - Self-hosting available, both client and server are completely FOSS - File sharing - Voice/video calls
I have a screenshot if anyone wants to see what a Matrix chat room would look like:
https://i.imgur.com/aVILcWB.png
Or you can join the room I made:
https://matrix.to/#/!EiTljkvagZDFKfQfFu:matrix.org?via=matrix.org
Alteratively, if you have a Matrix client already:
#wlug:matrix.org
Any thoughts?
-Josh