How many people actually use fpc/Lazarus ? I was told there were thousands and thousands of downloads. Does this mean that there are this many people using it? Or is it being downloaded for for other reasons? If it is the former, there should be no shortage of people around to participate in forums and chat. Is enough being done to make people aware of ways to be involved in the fpc community?

Fpc is an open source hobby project where people donate their time. Users of fpc should be encouraged to donate their time as well to help make the project better.

One of the ways that they can do this is by helping other users in real-time chat. I suspect that many people who use fpc/Lazarus are either unaware of irc real-time chat, have been chased away by people sabotaging it or have been discouraged from trying it by people who want this project to fail.

When I first started using Lazarus in 2015, it was my understanding there was chat support. The irc channel was very helpful and I learned a lot of things. I never imagined that the chat support would ever cease to exist. What is there to prevent the same thing from happening again to the forums or mailing lists? So far as I can tell , ’ve had questions go unanswered in the forums before, so support from forums is not guaranteed. There should be more options for support not less. I had to figure out how to solve the problem all by myself with no help whatsoever. People who are less fond of fpc would probably just get frustrated and leave.

This would not be the first time that an online community that I care about has disappeared. A chat channel is much like a canary in a coal mine. It is small element in the project and may to some people seem to not do anything useful and be irrelevant and frivolous. It easy for people who don’t need it to not care about it disappearing. I assure you there are people who need chat and most of them quietly leave rather than complain. It’s not a good idea to look the other way as parts of your community start to disappear, even if you don’t want to participate in them they still are still vital.

People using project are more likely listen to the advice of developers that announce where the chat channel is than someone whom they don’t know promoting a channel. I want to let you know thatNickolay is both a Lazarus developer and the owner of #fpc on Libera irc. Nicolay is well known in this community. Everyone who appreciates the work that he does should help support his channel whenever they have a chance and hopefully chat with him when he is online. There is also the #fpc-dev channel on Libera to meet at.

Sent from ProtonMail Mobile

On 2023-05-27 14:05, HSN via fpc-other wrote:

Joanna,

.
.

.
.

I'm sorry to say that, but your continuing attempts to blame external enemies for limited/declining IRC channel popularity rather than accepting or at least just considering repeated arguments clearly showing other reasons won't change anything. See e.g. the Wikipedia article about IRC showing clear trends (unrelated to FPC). The reasons of these general trends should be very understandable for people with good analytical skills (as expected for most developers).

.
.

Nikolay and Charlie, two FPC core team members at least occasionally joining IRC, both explicitly confirmed that their IRC availability had been limited, which was one of the reasons why the FPC core team decided that no IRC channel should be considered as official. Both forums and mailing lists provide higher chances to get response from one of the FPC core team members in case of complex issues where support of other FPC users and developers may not be sufficient. There are no guarantees to get answer for just any question for any of the channels (it's a hobby project and nobody gets paid for support), but the probability is clear (chances for finding a solution is further improved by possibility to search through previous discussions in the forum or the mailing list archive). Obviously, anybody can still use whatever channel meeting their needs and preferences and people providing support in whatever channel rather than just seeking for help with their own issues are very welcome in any case regardless from the used channel, but that doesn't change the overall situation.

Tomas

Tomas Hajny via fpc-other said on Sun, 28 May 2023 17:12:23 +0200

Both forums and mailing lists provide higher chances to get response from one of the FPC core team members in case of complex issues where support of other FPC users and developers may not be sufficient.

True. However, in a well attended IRC channel run in a reasonable manner, answers to simple questions come through much quicker with IRC than with forums and mailing lists.

SteveT

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

HSN via fpc-other said on Sat, 27 May 2023 12:05:42 +0000

It's kind of hard for the 31 of us who are banned to support Nicolay by chatting on his channel.

SteveT

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

Hi, I’d like to say, just because a bunch of people follow a trend doesn’t mean that’s a good idea. History is full of stories about foolish people following trends and bad ideas which lead to their demise.

Abandoning irc, {which is one of the few online platforms that allows you to choose/create your own client and doesn’t require a phone number or email to chat} is just another example of what I consider amazes me how easy it is to trick people into leaving the platform where they can communicate freely on the internet without censorship, advertising or data harvesting.

Discord is most definitely NOT an irc replacement. It is spyware and it’s user experience is horrible. They seem to have a large team of developers but it can’t even resize properly. I guess the developers were more interested in the data harvesting code. Everytime I’ve tried it, my computer fan starts running like crazy which means it’s up to no good.

The same thing could be accomplished without the spyware by simply having a forum where people continually talk into a small number of threads.

Yes it supposedly has voice chat. Do you think I want to voice chat with strangers I meet online? Not yet but if I ever do there are already other voice chat solutions.

As for the person who keeps complaining about me banning people , his irc account was registered 2 years 6 days ago. He had 691 days in which he could have joined #fpc and helped make the channel a success, yet he refused.

Now he suddenly cares about fpc community. I think this is great! I have urged him to invite all the trolls and bots that I banned from #fpc to his channel. Who knows ? Maybe he can get them interested in using fpc and writing some code. That would be a win win situation for all of us.

If there is anyone here who wants to help reverse the downward spiral and help with chat support please come support the only chat channel owned by developers and long time fpc enthusiasts. If not I’ll just assume there is nobody available and that would be a sad situation indeed regarding the population and health of the fpc community.

The details are here

IRC.LIBERA.CHAT Ports [6667 plaintext ] or [6697 secure] channels #fpc

pm joanna in forums if you need help or want to be added to invite list.

I have used hexchat irc client or irc cloud but there are many irc clients to choose from.

HSN wrote

Hi, I’d like to say, just because a bunch of people follow a trend doesn’t mean that’s a good idea. History is full of stories about foolish people following trends and bad ideas which lead to their demise.

.
.

I don't tell anybody to follow the trends. I just state that the reasons of your supposed "downward spiral" are different from those you blame and that regardless of my or your preferences or thoughts about those trends, reverting them is less than likely...

Tomas

Tomas I’m curious if you have ever been to irc at all? If so can you elaborate on your experiences there?

Wikipedia is an interesting website and is good for reading about a lot of different things but it is definitely not an unbiased source of information. I have been active in Irc almost everyday since 2014 therefore I am highly qualified to say what is happening with irc. I was in irc when all the gamers went dashing off to discord.

People voluntarily leaving irc doesn’t preclude the fact that irc gets attacked regularly. There are a lot of people who don’t like discord and prefer irc. So we have a lot of trolls /bots coming to irc to make life as miserable as possible for the people who remain.

There are all sorts of trolls/bots saying unpleasant things, spamming and interrupting conversations. They sometimes park themselves in channel with a vulgar nickname. Anything they can get away with , they will do. There are people trying to hijack channels in order to shut them down in hopes that it will make people leave irc. There are also a lot of accounts that just sit there and collect all information but never talk. I don’t know what they do with the information they collect.

There were people who were happy with irc. Freenode had about 90,000 accounts connected usually.

So someone decided something needed to be done about that, and to make a long story short freenode was destroyed and only about 45,000 made it to Libera.

On Libera there were bots/troll attacking from from day one. Valuable members of #fpc were prevented from creating accounts because the server was being spammed by trolls who were creating all their alt accounts. Many of those alt accounts would later end up on the #fpc ban list.

I should have made the channel invite only but I had this foolish notion that it should be easy for pascal enthusiasts to find us. Well I was wrong. Not very many pascal enthusiasts came, mostly just lurkers and trolls.

I often wonder if people still use pascal seems kind of lonely and programmers I know in real life want nothing to do with it. The hatred that most people have for anything to do with pascal even though they have never even tried fpc/Lazarus is astounding.

I want more people to discover and use fpc it’s a great project.

But all I get is harassment from trolls and people who sit on the sidelines refusing to help. {Please disregard that last statement if you are a developer too busy working on code it’s not directed at you}

How many people are in this mailing list reading but refuse to help with chat support? How many people on this mailing list hate the fpc project and want to drive it into a ditch? I don’t know.

Are there any people at all? Maybe the mailing list only has 5 people? What a sad situation for such amazing project.

It does not have to be this way. We can turn this around.

Please pm joanna in forums if you want to help and we can create a new better chat support. I want people new to fpc to be able to have the same type help that I received. Currently this is not possible.

HSN wrote

Tomas I’m curious if you have ever been to irc at all? If so can you elaborate on your experiences there?

.
.

No, I will not elaborate on my experiences, because it's completely unrelated to my arguments (similarly to the remainder of your message), and I will not continue in this discussion either, regardless from how much you pretend as if IRC were the only relevant and/or valuable support channel.

Tomas

I have to correct you on this.. IRC is NOT the only method of communicating about fpc, {it’s just my favorite.} I like the forums too because they contain a wealth of searchable knowledge and let people in different time zones have discussions.

I’m sorry if your experiences in irc were unsatisfactory. I don’t like time being wasted any more than you do so I’ve ended up with the moderation style that I have. However i hope nobody is deterred from using IRC because I’m strict. There are many other channels including #lazarus that are the opposite of #fpc.

I will continue to maintain a high quality place to discuss fpc for those who need it.

Thank you for reading and have a good day.

Tomas Hajny via fpc-other said on Wed, 31 May 2023 00:24:44 +0200

Hi Tomas,

IRC isn't for everyone, but it's a *very* good way to get instant answers to short questions, always assuming it's run competently, which #fpc unfortunately isn't.

In no way am I asking you to elaborate, continue, or try out IRC: You have work to do. I'm writing this only so other people might see IRC as a possible positive, in spite of Joanna's tude.

SteveT

HSN via fpc-other said on Wed, 31 May 2023 21:50:20 +0000

I will continue to maintain a high quality place to discuss fpc for those who need it.

In the preceding sentence, the word "continue" is misleading. If you want to *start* to maintain a high quality place to discuss fpc for those who need it, then you would:

1) Quit treating it like the Joanna fan club.

2) Quit harassing people who come there with entrance examinations.

3) Quit banning people who insult nobody and mind their own business, or people who object to your current aggressive behavior on #fpc.

Everyone else: If you want a non stressful, non judgmental venue in which to get quick answers, check out #fpc-alt for ontopic, and ##fpc-alt for offtopic.

SteveT

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

.
.

Everyone else: If you want a non stressful, non judgmental venue in which to get quick answers, check out #fpc-alt for ontopic, and ##fpc-alt for offtopic.

Thanks to both Steve and Joanna for letting FPC users know the alternatives. I'd like to ask everybody not to continue the discussion about moderation styles - I believe that anybody interested in details can easily find all the arguments and opinions in the mailing list archive and there's no reason to repeat them here.

Tomas
(putting my mailing list moderator hat on :-) )