Re: A few observations about GIMPNET

[Sebastian Keller <sebastian-keller gmx de>]

Hi,

I'm one of the guys who has been doing irc support on both networks for
several years now and I think I can provide some observations here:

Am Montag, den 15.10.2012, 12:32 +0200 schrieb Andrea Veri:
> Freenode has more than 80000 users and I'm pretty much sure a lot of
> new contributors willing to join the GNOME Project are looking for
> #gnome-* channels there and not on GIMPNET which is a network with
> less than 2000 users connected per day, it's a matter of numbers.

I have seen people on #gnome on freenode asking for the official
channels of gnome components, but those were very very few and almost
all of them were asking for support and not how to contribute to
development. (Assuming they tried #gnome after they found out #gnome-*
does not exist) The only exception was #gtk+ but nobody was interested
in development of gtk just development with gtk.

This is also a general observation, most people who join the freenode
channel are looking for support - and more people join the freenode
#gnome channel rather than the gimpnet one when asking for support.
(Despite there being more people on the gimpnet one most of the time,
but that is because most of those leave after they got support)

If there were many more #gnome-* channels on freenode that would
probably make it harder to provide support, because that would mean
having to follow every of those channels.

Another useful thing about having gnome channels on a separate network
is that LIST can actually be used to find channels. I'm not just talking
about searching channels but also discovering them by simply browsing
the list.

That being said I also can see how it would be more convenient to have
all free software channels on the same network. I have no strong opinion
on either way but I just wanted to point out that the argument about
getting more contributors is not really a strong one.


Regards,
Sebastian