[fpc-other] Re downward spiral

[HSN]

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 to at all. It 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.
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