[crossfire] Improving IRC availability with a chat bridge

[Kevin Zheng]

On 1/31/19 9:47 PM, Mark Wedel wrote:
>   I should probably transfer ownership of crossfire to someone else - I 
> haven't had much time to work on it lately, and seems unlikely that I'll 
> find time anytime soon.  But that wasn't really the question here.

I nominate Rick, who has been a pretty essential part of the project for 
many, many years.

>   It is hard to argue about making the game (or chat channels) more 
> accessible to more people.  There are a few thoughts here:
> 
> - Move chat to another system that is more widely used/available, with 
> the understanding that it still needs to be accessible to linux users.  
> So if there is a web interface, probably acceptable.  If the only thing 
> is a windows program, probably not.

I imagine many of us (myself included) who have gotten quite accustomed 
to IRC, and would prefer to keep it.

> - Set up a gateway.  As noted, this could have issues related to 
> freenode policy.  One thought there is to change the topic to clear 
> state that there is a gateway being used.  I'm not actually sure how 
> messages would get attributed when moved between the 2 chats - I'd 
> imagine there may be a forwarding agent string involved.  And handling 
> of private messages would need to be carefully done (if one replies to 
> the forwarding agent privately, you probably don't want to that appear 
> to all the users on the other chat system)

 From my understanding, it seems like Freenode would permit bridges so 
long that it's clear that users are clearly and prominently notified 
that the bridge exists; I have participated in other channels on 
Freenode that very clearly state that they log chats publicly, for example.

-- 
Kevin Zheng
kevinz5000 at gmail.com | kevinz at berkeley.edu | PGP: 0xC22E1090