Personally, I don’t need yet another platform to be communicating on. Sorry, anything more than like 5 emails, 2 skypes and a crap-ton of IRC channels and I think I might go nuts.
Why not just create an IRC channel though? #sponge-casual
EDIT: Will join via IRC if I can get it to work. My point still stands though.
Rather than utilize the Sponge IRC channel which already has much of the community chatting and is staffed by the Sponge staff, you created a separate chat place for you to control? I don’t get it.
IRC clients can connect to slack. Slack is just nicer to use and it allows for us to have a slightly more closed off group (so we don’t have the people who haven’t read the FAQ asking questions)
My point was that there is already an extensive IRC community with many channels discussing many topics. This slack chat seems to unnecessarily segment/fragment.
Subjective statement
So you don’t want to welcome new users? Creating an exclusive club?
I have nothing wrong against new users, we actually had several IRC rooms all separated which are now being brought onto the slack network. Maybe it’s not exactly as “new user friendly” but anyone could get in by just PMing us their email and we will invite them. (I’m simply saying that we won’t have as many people who haven’t read the FAQ since by the time they find this thread they probably already will have read them.)
While I will join, I still frankly don’t see the point of this over an IRC chat. If you need additional functions either get a bot or make your own. If you need something external for chat… e.g. If you need to share files or set schedules use google calendar. My general philosophy is to setup a workflow in which you can use multiple specialized programs vs one big program doing a mediocre job. Plain IRC is the king of anonymous chat.
I remade the group to provide a place of communication for those in the Sponge Skype Chat. It didn’t matter if the members were Sponge Staff or just some random forum people. We were pretty much a little fraternity, wanting to grow. Skype and IRC were a bit controlling, Skype lacking a few feature here and there, IRC being very tedious to work with. Slack provides a bypass to some of the restrictions imposed by IRC and skype, such as custom emoji, and channels, whilst Skype doesn’t have channels, and IRC doesn’t have emoji. It also provides new things to learn, such as team permissions and private groups. We like Slack for the shiny and coolio things it adds to our social life. That’s why I brought this thing up. It’s something new to learn, something new to add to the hard drive in our head.
Gitter is free, easy to use, open, has OS and mobile apps, doesn’t require invitations, and even supports emoji (unlike IRC! What a bunch of stone-age garbage, that is…). https://gitter.im/SpongePowered/SpongeAPI
