Vega Strike is moving to Libera.chat for our primary IRC communications.

We have been monitoring the situation with the FreeNode, and after seeing some of the antics that FreeNode has pulled this last week or so and with a general consensus for the few of us ever present in the IRC we have moved our primary IRC channel over to Libera.chat.

What about the FreeNode Channel?

We haven’t been directly impacted yet, but several of on IRC are no longer comfortable with a wait and see approach as we have been taking while watching things unfold with other major open source projects that are more present on IRC than we have been.

That said, we have historically run with two IRC provides - a primary and a backup. However, our backup provider (irc.stealth.net) seems to no longer be around so at least for the foreseeable future we will maintain our FreeNode IRC channel as backup to our new home on Libera.chat.

How to get on libera.chat?

Libera.chat provides some excellent help on their website for registering a Nickname, and also for connecting using various clients. Please use their Guides to get started.

Why libera.chat?

After a number of events at FreeNode quite a few of the staff and operators left FreeNode. A great many of them joined together and created libera.chat with a goal of serving the open source community.

Where on libera.chat?

We have registered the #vegastrike and #vegastrike-* channels for our use with Libera.chat.

We will use #vegastrike for general communications and are looking to enable our community to use the #vegastrike-* channels for focused discussions, e.g #vegastrike-pwcu. If you’re interested in these community channels then please reach out.

Why keep around IRC when there’s more modern chats system available?

We have quite a diverse community coming from all stretches of life. Some folks still prefer the Forums, while others prefer IRC or Gitter.im. We want to enable our community to use the communications methods that they are most comfortable with so long as it’s not a burden for us all. We may even look at other solutions like Matrix.org which may help us bring these together into more coherent view to help administer them.

Want to help out?

We are certainly in need of volunteers to help run our various communications infrastructure. If you’re willing to help out, then please reach out to us either in our Gitter channel, IRC, or even fail e-mail.

If you’d like to be an IRC operator then please reach out.