[fpc-other] Re Downward spiral

[Tomas Hajny]

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


Joanna,

  .
  .
> 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.
  .
  .

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).


  .
  .
> 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 that
> Nickolay 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.

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