On Saturday, the CentOS IRC folks informed us that they instituted the requirement for Matrix users to have registered IRC nicks to participate in the CentOS Hyperscale Matrix room.
The full message quoted from Bahhumbug is below:
Bahhumbug
On August 28th, due to an issue that I am not fully at liberty to discuss in depth, I reinstated +r channel mode on this channel. This requires users to be authenticated to IRC services before they may join the channel. +r was removed to make it easier for matrix users to participate. This is no longer tenable from a privacy and security standpoint for this (or any other CentOS) channel. Matrix users will have to go through the matrix guide, https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/admin_room.html which is linked from https://libera.chat/guides/faq#can-i-connect-with-matrix, specifically the !username and !storepass appservice commands, to ensure they are auth'd to our services before access will be granted to and participate. This basically puts -hyperscale on the same footing as the other channels in our namespace.
I'm not sure what kind of issue would cause this, but this is problematic for us because we have users and members who are in our Matrix room that do not interact with any IRC stuff. Additionally, this issue has seemingly not come up on the Fedora side, so I'm skeptical of the nature and severity of the issue.
If we can't have this working as desired, should we consider unbridging and orphaning our IRC channel? I personally value people being able to easily interact with us more than maintaining the legacy IRC channel, but I'd like to know what others think.
cc: @shaunm, @kevin, @mattdm
I don't think we should unbridge at the moment. CentOS has a significant IRC presence, and I think it's important to meet the users (and potential contributors) where they are, and for this project that's IRC (and Matrix of course) at the moment. If this changes and in the future CentOS becomes more Matrix centric, then this should obviously be reevaluated.
We do need to document how to access the channel though (on both the IRC and Matrix ends) so that users have a good experience.
We can link to https://kparal.wordpress.com/2021/06/01/connecting-to-libera-chat-through-matrix/ which I think is still the best one-pager guide on the topic
Metadata Update from @ngompa: - Issue untagged with: meeting
Another option is the way some fedora channels are setup:
matrix users are given 'voice' on irc (shows as power level 1 on matrix) voiced users are exempted from the registration requirement.
Of course this means someone can come in from matrix and not be registered with nickserv, but depending on what caused the reason for the registration requirement, this might be ok ?
I'd be fine with that, and I actually had thought that's how we had the room set up before (apparently we didn't...).
I've linked this from https://sigs.centos.org/hyperscale/communication/channels together with the IRC guide on the wiki.
The decision got made for us when Libera Chat unbridged everything. I'm going to update our documentation to point explicitly to the Matrix room for general chat.
I have filed fedora-infrastructure#11591 to purge the IRC bridge from our Matrix room.
This has been done
Metadata Update from @salimma: - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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