On 2020-01-17 11:17:40 +0800 (+0800), Tony Pearce wrote: [...]
With regards to IRC - in my experience, once you get passed the authentication problems
These are a relatively recent and unfortunate addition to our channels, necessitated by spammers randomly popping in and generally being nuisances for everyone. We keep testing the waters by lifting the identification requirement here and there, but the coast is not yet clear. We'd really rather people were able to freely join and ask questions without setting up accounts, it's just a bit hard to keep our channels usable that way at the moment.
and often session timeout/kick out, you see the chat room with 300 people but no one chatting or answering. Kind of reduces the worth of the chatroom this way in my opinion. Although, I am in Australia so the timezone I am in could be a contributor.
Certainly the bulk of discussion for most projects happens when Europe and the Americas are awake, so likely less in the middle of your day and a lot more overnight for you. There may be some increased activity in your mornings or evenings at least. But if this is the #openstack channel, the bigger problem is that it's just not got a lot of people with answers to user questions paying attention in there (I too am guilty of forgetting to keep tabs on it). The fundamental truth is that whenever you balkanize communications into topic areas for "users" and "developers," the end result is that the user forum is all questions nobody's answering because most of the folks with answers are all conversing somewhere else in places where such questions are discouraged. We used to have separate mailing lists for user questions, sharing between operators, and development topics; those suffered precisely the same problem and I'm quite happy we agreed as a community to merge the lists into one where users' questions *are* getting seen by people who already possess the necessary knowledge to provide accurate answers and guidance. -- Jeremy Stanley