I created a chat on https://robotics.stackexchange.com/ for ROS. The main purpose and rationale is to bring experts together to discuss interesting problems (related to ROS) and helping beginners (and non-) in solving their problems in real-time for a more active and hopefully healthy community.
Isn’t that why we have discourse.ros.org and answers.ros.org?
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Yes, but that is a more real-time alternative which hopefully will attract users from Stack Exchange communities. As a matter of fact, you answered me after almost 1h, whereas in that chat, if someone is constantly there, you can tag that person and that person will be notified and eventually will help faster.
If you’re really bored, you can hang out in the barren wasteland that is rosorg.slack.com
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I came to make a comparison between the ROS IRC channel and Mars (been there forever, may have had life once, now populated by bots). But I checked the channel first and discovered, much to my amazement, that it’s actually been fairly active recently!
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I fully agree! The #ros IRC channel is a nice place to hangout, as is the #moveit IRC channel for everything MoveIt!
How can we get logins to the slack account ?
In light of the Slack channel being even quieter than the IRC we’d like to officially deprecate it. Setting up the Slack channel was an experiment to see if we could build more community through the new tool. However it seems that it’s been more of a distraction and split peoples limited focus.
I would like to encourage people interested in realtime chat about ROS to use the IRC channel.
Bringing everyone together in one public place is the most likely to get critical mass.
As linked above you can find the ros channel on freenode. Details are at: Get Involved - ROS Wiki
Logs are viewable at: BotBot.me + Startup Resources | Startup Resources
And there are multiple web clients if you don’t have an IRC client installed locally.
You can follow either of these links. (Please change your username)
This is part of the challenge of slack. We had to setup a special heroku app to allow people to request invites to even be able to view the convesations. Maintaining this is part of the overhead we don’t want to keep incurring for such a low volume.
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In the IRC chat room there’s usually just one person that is capable of answering a few questions, and many times it is inactive. Furthermore, Stack Exchange communities seem to be more visible to a wider range of people with respect to IRC chats. If I had to bet on a growing and sustainable community I would not do it on the IRC chat room.
The stack exchange chat doesn’t seem to have a client. +1 for irc
As far as I know, you’re right, so far there isn’t a client for the Stack Exchange’s chats (except clearly the browser). A plus for the chat I created is that it’s really a chat on a website regarding robotics, so, possibly, there we could group a wider range of experts in the field.