It seems that it is time to archive years of IRC chat logs from multiple Haiku IRC channels. I was surprised to see on the Echelog website (the website that hosts Haiku IRC chat logs), that the service is shutting down: https://echelog.com/
Correction: I thought Echelog hosted the IRC channels themselves, but that is actually Freenode.
In addition: I may have found a good replacement for Echelog: https://freenode.logbot.info/
And here I learn that this was originally created specifically for Haiku 
How about that! 
I see the owner is looking to hand over the site to some other willing person according to the shut down message. Would it be worth it for the Haiku organization to run the site? (I mean, we did inspire the site’s creation. 
)
Another reason to stop using IRC for anything serious.
We know you don’t like IRC, but I’m not sure why you need to use this as an excuse to prove your point.
If log server will shut down, it will be even harder to access discussion history. So it proves that if you use IRC your conversation can be lost. Forums/mailing lists are more reliable way of communication.
As the page says, the logs are being archived, and you can contact the owner – which I have already done, and am in communication with him about what Haiku wants to do. So you are incorrect about that.
If this were Telegram or some other chat service shutting down, we would probably have to write a “scraper” to save all the history. Here, we can just ask nicely for a copy of it, and switch services.
Forums and mailing lists may be more “reliable” in the sense they are more permanent, but it is so much more efficient to have many discussions on chat than in a forum or the like. The format is just different.
Hi,
May I ask what the plan is here? If Echelog is indeed being shut down in two weeks, we should probably worry about setting up a new logging bot?
I’m not sure what precisely is happening, I talked to Brian and he said that some sort of archiving will be happening, but I didn’t get further details.
It looks like https://freenode.logbot.info/ is easily configured, so we may just switch to that.
For traditional IRC clients, that is true to some extent. But this is why I mainly switched to a Matrix client instead which can connect to existing IRC channels on freenode via the IRC bridge and also preserves the chat history in your account as soon as you join in the channel and even if the client is closed.
This sort of solves my issue of losing the chat history of IRC channels without loggers at least. But I find it more of an instant way of communication than mailing lists for example.
The IRC is nice for quickly discussing some programming problems, but quite unsuitable for more long-winded discussionsabout the future of Haiku or that kind of thing. That’s why we have IRC, mailing lists, and a forum. They each cover different usages.
And yes, IRC conversations can be lost. Do we really need to archive everything? IRC isn’t meant to be a long term storage of knowledge. It’s nice to have logs, but I don’t find it mandatory at all. In fact I think I used them maybe once or twice in 10 years of contributing to Haiku.
Does anyone have the old BeShare logs? Was that even a thing?
Before entering the IRC room I will read the lRC log from the last day/days.
So I know what I have missed. So I use it daily!
I know some people on IRC never seem to read the log files, because I get no answer at all for questions i had.
After searching on the Echelog site, it seems that the log archives were all taken down…do we have these logs backed up somewhere?
For now, Archive.org looks to be a resource: https://web.archive.org/web/20200623104329/https://echelog.com/logs/browse/haiku/1592604000
I found that new IRC logs are available at https://freenode.logbot.info/haiku/.
Yes that is the new log for Haiku IRC channel…
The link onhttps://www.haiku-os.org/community/irc/ was adjusted accordingly:
“https://freenode.logbot.info/haiku/20210302”
given prevailing attitudes towards censorship, cancel culture, mob mentality etc, maybe it’s best to not log public discussions, at all.
I am not online always. So sometimes I ask a question and quit Haiku some days.
By using Haiku again I check the channel logs for answers to my questions…
Maybe the logs just should not kept forever? Maybe a month is far than ok?
It should be kept as long as possible because developers may write some important implementation details that are not mentioned anywhere else. Developer may stop being active so asking become not possible.