All other large projects and enterprises have reliable real time chat support, but not us! Even the #fpc-dev channel is all but abandoned. It used to have a bot giving information about things happening with fpc. But not anymore. Something needs to be done about this.

Why on earth are we not allowed to have an official chat support channel anymore??

This is a severe handicap and puts us at a big disadvantage compared to other projects wherein developers can discuss things in real-time whenever they like without any interference.

Lack of proper chat channels also discourages talented people from joining our community and participating. I keep hearing people saying that pascal is a dead language everywhere I go and to be honest the condition of our chat channels does little to disprove this.

Sometimes people have difficulties such as setting up the Lazarus ide on their computer and need someone to help or at least the assurance that help is available if needed. It’s not a good experience to suddenly have a strange problem and have nobody to talk to. Forums and mailing lists are great but they cannot replace real-time help. Potential users of fpc/Lazarus see that we don’t have chat support and don’t even bother getting involved or give up as soon as they have difficulty installing or using.

It’s currently nearly impossible to get any real-time help with fpc/Lazarus related problems anymore because the people who are best qualified to do this are either absent or inactive.

It’s about time we had a active functioning real time irc chat support again with active developers and fpc/Lazarus experts like other serious projects do.

Yes I understand that people have real life responsibilities and no I don’t want developers to take time away from writing code. However I believe that this is more a problem of complacency that can easily be solved if all users of fpc just contribute whatever time they can spare to helping others in real time chat when they are able to do so.

I’m tired of this downward spiral of allegedly nobody at all participating in the entire project is ever available to provide real-time chat support therefore nobody new wants to join our community because there is the perception that it lacks support and is semi abandoned.

Contrary to popular belief I’m not happy about the sole responsibility of maintaining the only active #fpc irc chat channel being foisted upon me. All I’ve ever wanted to do is read and participate in chats about pascal related things. This was all possible until 2018.

Since 2019 the chat channels have been repeatedly attacked , and this fact is very well documented. #fpc and #lazarus-ide were literally erased from freenode along with all of the members accounts. The attacks on the chat channels by trolls continue relentlessly and are used as a pretext to disrupt the forums and mailing lists as well.

It would be far better to have people who are skilled developers endorse the irc channel and generate the content. I prefer a more minor role of just helping with moderation and possibly answering questions that are within my skill level.

Irc is the best chat platform for people who are present and available to chat. It also has notifications so it’s not necessary to watch it constantly. You can do other things on or near your computer while irc is running. It even works on mobile devices.

I’m tired of hearing excuses, especially from people who are quick to criticize my diligent efforts to do the best I can.

Just in case someone tries to yap about discord, please preemptively read this article.

http://shystudios.us/blog/discord/discord.html

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On 2023-05-26 05:31, HSN via fpc-other wrote:

Hello,

All other large projects and enterprises have reliable real time chat support, but not us!

The obvious difference between FPC and "enterprises" is that FPC is an open-source hobby project, whereas enterprises having some sort of chat usually pay this using small part of money collected from their customers. BTW, those enterprises having chat try more and more to involve bots in those efforts in order to reduce the associated costs, i.e. not all of these chats are human powered. It is not true that "all other large projects...have real...time chat" (reliable or not). In reality, many projects moved from real-time chat to other forms of support (if they had such a support at the beginning at all).

It is not about allowing or disallowing anything, but simply matter of not having members of the project team interested in this form of communication and having sufficient capacity for it. Anybody interested is still free to use IRC for FPC related discussion, that has nothing to do with some channel being official or not.

This is a severe handicap and puts us at a big disadvantage compared to other projects wherein developers can discuss things in real-time whenever they like without any interference.

Not true. FPC users and developers have several other possibilities to get support and discuss things. The manpower is the limit, not the channel.

Lack of proper chat channels also discourages talented people from joining our community and participating. I keep hearing people saying that pascal is a dead language everywhere I go and to be honest the condition of our chat channels does little to disprove this.

Not true. Real-time chat is anything but a modern and fancy communication channel which might attract people interested in modern and fancy languages.

The response from forums and mailing lists is often much faster than support provided for commercial products, yet these products still have their customers and users.

Potential users of fpc/Lazarus see that we don’t have chat support and don’t even bother getting involved or give up as soon as they have difficulty installing or using.

Not true. Real-time chat is very likely not the first/most preferred support option for most new users of FPC/Lazarus and no, it is not true that comparable projects all have this kind of channel available.

It’s currently nearly impossible to get any real-time help with fpc/Lazarus related problems anymore because the people who are best qualified to do this are either absent or inactive.

That situation has nothing to do with the particular communication channel and/or the status of that channel.

Again, it is not like that real-time chat is the only option for users. Yes, some users may prefer this channel, but the more communication channel, the higher overhead and thus less capacity for the real problem resolution.

.
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It would be far better to have people who are skilled developers endorse the irc channel and generate the content. I prefer a more minor role of just helping with moderation and possibly answering questions that are within my skill level.

.
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Understood. However, as already stressed many times, the main reason of FPC developers not being involved in the IRC channel is not related to your role.

Tomas

To summarize, I hate real time channels.

How hell can you find informations that you need?

Forums are a much better alternative.

HSN via fpc-other said on Fri, 26 May 2023 03:31:04 +0000

I prefer a more minor role of just helping with moderation and possibly answering questions that are within my skill level.

It was your moderation that led to the downward spiral of #fpc.

To the rest of you: In the past few days on #fpc-alt we've discussed Pascal performance relative to C and others, and the role of case insensitivity. #fpc-alt is a good, lighthearted and productive community.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm

In addition to lack of chat support we also have the problem of people who hate pascal and want to sabotage fpc project infiltrating our support channels to cause trouble and waste our time.

Even the bug tracker has been trolled by someone complaining about pascal not being more like c.

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Discord is just a modern version of IRC.  I personally see no difference between the two, except that discord is harder to access, since you can't use just any old client to connect like you can with irc.

Hopefully that will change as time goes on, but for me, there's no functional difference.