Ogre Discord server?

[drwbns]

Hey guys. Anyone know if there is an Ogre3D discord server is running? I did a search but was surprised to find nothing. Can a moderator or person in charge make one for the community?

[sercero]

There is something similar: https://gitter.im/OGRECave/ogre

I don't think there is a Discord server, might be a good idea.

[dark_sylinc]

I don't think there is a Discord server, might be a good idea.

I don't think that'd be a good idea. We're not a 50k-active-users library. Splitting our presences only makes it harder for us to be reached or questions to be seen. We also have to moderate those spaces; and some get left out.

For example I don't think there's any of the devs on IRC, and we no longer get questions on why we're not anymore there ever since the Freenode takeover and our channel used to be there.

I much prefer Discord over Gitter but I wasn't the one who set it up and besides Gitter has the advantage of letting you sign in with Github, Gitlab & Twitter. Our main audience already has account in at least one of those services thus it makes it easier to begin engaging with us; so that's a big plus.

[EricB]

I don't think there is a Discord server, might be a good idea.

I don't think that'd be a good idea. We're not a 50k-active-users library. Splitting our presences only makes it harder for us to be reached or questions to be seen. We also have to moderate those spaces; and some get left out.

For example I don't think there's any of the devs on IRC, and we no longer get questions on why we're not anymore there ever since the Freenode takeover and our channel used to be there.

I much prefer Discord over Gitter but I wasn't the one who set it up and besides Gitter has the advantage of letting you sign in with Github, Gitlab & Twitter. Our main audience already has account in at least one of those services thus it makes it easier to begin engaging with us; so that's a big plus.

I am a little late to this conversation, but I would like to mention that the IRC channel was pretty active for many years without a developer in it. A whole lot of us old-timers had to maintain, keep it active, and answer new comer's questions. And yes, there were still quite a few new people popping in now and then to ask questions, even as late as 2021... We had to turn away a lot of 2.x users questions, because most of us were using/had used old 1.x versions. (I used 1.7 myself up until 2019.)

Ogre's development team's refusal to idle in an IRC channel with 80+ past and present Ogre users is one major reason why the IRC channel died. Bad community relations work IMO. Slowly those users left the channel, but at a slower pace than the death of these forums. The final nail in the coffin was the Freenode schism. Most FOSS projects and users left for Libra.chat. Being probably the most active #Ogre3d IRC user over the last decade, I tried to register it on Libra, but Libra's rejected me because of their asinine rules.

Many other people, including myself, have zero desire to use gitter. I won't even consider connecting to it if I needed support. It's an awful chat protocol and aimed mainly at Github users. (Discord is worse, but I digress.) What I never understood all these years is if the Ogre Dev team is so steadfast in pimping the glitter to the point that they let other established and more aligned networks die, why didn't they just make a bridge between these networks and let users decide how and where they want to chat? Surely in 2018, there weren't 40 people on gitter. We had those numbers on the IRC, 10-20% of whom were active at any given time on the channel. With an occasional new comer popping in after finding us on irc channel search.

It's moot now for IRC since the Freenode schism killed the last remains of the IRC channel, but there isn't a single reason not to connect a Discord to their glitter if there is enough demand for Discord. If the devs want to remain on gitter, they can. Just setup a matter bridge and connect the two networks. All done.

[paroj]

some context:

I set-up the gitter channel when I moved Ogre to github, as anyone who wants to submit an issue on github automatically also has a gitter account. Note that at this time the majority of Ogre devs still clung to bitbucket/ mercurial.

Actually, I tried to contact the last IRC admin for the Ogre channel first, but did not get any response. And it makes little sense to promote the channel as official, if the Ogre team cannot moderate it.

Nowadays, gitter is part of Matrix network, which you can think of "modern IRC". There are bridges to IRC, so in theory given a Matrix account, you can chat via IRC on gitter. There are also Discord bridges for that matter.

[EricB]

Actually, I tried to contact the last IRC admin for the Ogre channel first, but did not get any response. And it makes little sense to promote the channel as official, if the Ogre team cannot moderate it.

Sadly, Freenode of old was ran by the same folks that ran Libra, so the same absurd rules in respect to channel registrations. Anyway, if you would have talked to those of us that ran the channel unofficially (without moderator status)**, we could have told you the guy idling there with ops didn't have founder control, and the accounts that did have founder status had been awol'd for 10-15 years. We tried to gain control of the channel several times in the early 2010s. Someone with a valid @ogre3d.org email address with proof that they were being allowed by the project to take over the channel would have had to petition Freenode for ownership.

**If you did, sorry that I missed it. I started cutting back IRC a bit starting around the time you took over 1.x

That being said, the community was pretty good at self moderating for years.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there and in the past.

Nowadays, gitter is part of Matrix network, which you can think of "modern IRC". There are bridges to IRC, so in theory given a Matrix account, you can chat via IRC on gitter. There are also Discord bridges for that matter.

I know quite a bit about matrix and the bridges. It doesn't help the layman users who just wants to click a discord link and be taken to the channel that talks about Ogre though.

As for myself, I have backed away from all chat networks (and foss projects), except use of IRC to manage my business and my business community. I ran out of free time for anything else. I'm not here complaining about IRC, I'm just pointing out what I see as a flaw in community outreach. (And throwing some salt around about the past failure of this.) OP wanted to join #Ogre3d via Discord. A simple solution is give him a discord link that is your glitter channel. Without that, it's probably one less person around the community chat.