With the recent changes at Freenode we have decided that we should no longer host or promote the IRC channel there. If you have not seen the recent coverage I’ve provided a few links below to new coverage. There’s a lot more information out there.
We have removed references to the channel and recommend that users not use it. In the recent changes we like many other projects have lost control of the channel and can no longer update the description.
We have specifically not setup a new IRC channel because historically the IRC channel has not had significant participation in the ROS community, recently it’s been a few messages per week. Which compares to answer.ros.org with hundreds of interactions per day. There has been a lengthy discussion of potential alternatives however we have reached no consensus. As such we’d like to focus now on consolidating on using the slightly more asynchronous but persistent solutions for communications of discourse.ros.org and answers.ros.org. They are generally more accessible and provide an easily searchable archive.
Recent news about Freenode: