Shut down remaining Gitter rooms

[SethTisue]

scala/scala, scala/cn, scala/fr

the latter two were kept open at the time we shut all the other non-English rooms down because people spoke up and said keep them open. but that was ages ago and the rooms are not active, so let's pull the plug

as for scala/scala, I think that at one time there was some value in keeping the room around in case the move to Discord didn't work out, or in case someone didn't know about the move to Discord

but at this point so much time has passed and I think it's time. it's not okay to leave the rooms up unless they are moderated, and although the effort it takes me to check in from time to time and ban spammers and so forth isn't large, at this point it just isn't worth it anymore

[SethTisue]

here is a small archive (115k compressed) of the scala/cn and scala/fr rooms in JSON format: Archive.zip

[SethTisue]

scala/scala archive, 6.6M: matrix - scalascala - Chat Export - 2024-10-16T19-19-07.063Z.json.zip

[SethTisue]

okay, in all three rooms I:

• made the room invite-only
• made the previous message history invisible
• made it so that only moderators can post new messages
• changed the room info to direct users to https://www.scala-lang.org/community/

I don't see any easy way to kick out all the users except by doing it one at a time. I don't think it matters

I don't see any easy way to outright delete the rooms, either, but I don't think it matters

so this is done

[SethTisue]

website updates: scala/scala-lang#1701

[som-snytt]

Excellent governance!

[SethTisue]

in my newly official capacity as Executioner 🪓

[SethTisue]

here's the scala/scala archive in plain text, which is more convenient for casual perusal by humans matrix - scalascala - Chat Export - 2024-10-16T22-28-34.465Z.txt.zip

[joroKr21]

made the previous message history invisible

Why not keep it? I think the main argument in favour of Gitter was that the message history was publicly available. I'm not sure if that's still the case.

[bjornregnell]

Why not keep it?
There are issues as @SethTisue explained above, e.g. moderation, effort etc. so I think it's right to close it.

But it might be good to perhaps just publish the scalascala chat export on the web so that it gets indexed and searchable? There is of course less and less relevance as Q&A gets outdated but it might still be of interest to see the history and also some explanations might still be relevant etc. Or perhaps wayback machine can help us?

[joroKr21]

Yeah, I meant just the history part

[SethTisue]

I personally can't get interested in investing further effort into putting the archives online, beyond what I've already done here. I see chat as an ephemeral medium. As in, I think the ephemerality is actually a good thing.

[bjornregnell]

I see chat as an ephemeral medium.

Fair enough. Many thanks for all your efforts and service to the community!!!

[joroKr21]

To me it sounded like you had to put in extra effort to hide the history 🤔
I didn't mean to publish it anywhere else, that sounds like a lot more effort indeed.

[SethTisue]

@joroKr21 Ah, I see. Well, let me explain further. I didn't think too hard when I did those few extra mouse clicks. I just figured that hiding the room and hiding the history would help drive home the point that the rooms are now closed. Also the rooms are now invite-only which means that people can't even get in to search the history, unless they're already in. I would have to reverse both of those decisions. That would be doable, but I'm resistant on the grounds that I expect that 99% of the time if someone is looking for a Scala chat room it's because they want to chat, and finding a dead chat room is just annoying noise in that context. Only 0.1% of the time is someone's intent "I want to search the years-ago archive of a long-dead chat room". I feel that use case is covered by having the archive zip files here.

It's not like (to my knowledge, anyway) Google was indexing that history and it will now be de-indexed because of what I did. Before Gitter moved to Matrix, the contents of Gitter rooms sometimes showed up in Google search, but in the years since then, I've never had a Gitter chat come up in a search.

Note that the archives here only go back to 2020 — they're only the post-Matrix-move archives. I don't know if the older archives are still accessible somehow, I haven't tried to find out (and I don't plan to).

[joroKr21]

It's not like (to my knowledge, anyway) Google was indexing that history and it will now be de-indexed because of what I did. Before Gitter moved to Matrix, the contents of Gitter rooms sometimes showed up in Google search, but in the years since then, I've never had a Gitter chat come up in a search.

Oh ok, I didn't know about this