Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 10:43 PM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> The problem there is simply that you can never log off once you join the IRC bridge

Ha! So that must be what Georges was talking about! I didn’t get that
it was about *IRC* servers.

> (or, if such a way exists, it's so hard to discover that the GNOME
> community is not using it).

There actually is a way. Once more it involves the GIMPNet IRC Bridge
status conversation. People can start a new conversation with
@gimpnet-irc:gnome.org by the way if they don’t have it anymore. The
bot has a !quit command and its help says:
`!quit : Leave all bridged channels, on all networks, and remove your
connections to all networks.`

> So if you try the IRC bridge once just to
> see what it's like, you're forever left  with a ghost user account that
> people will send private messages to without realizing you can't read
> them (or even public messages, if your real account is offline).

Removing inactive account is kind of a hard problem (would you be
happy to find out you lost your nick and history if for some reason
you came back a long while after your last use?) but I *think*
matrix.org actually has a policy to clean them up after several
months, which would reduce that issue.

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker