Re: [107attendees] Where the action is, at virtual meetings ...

[Tom Pusateri <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 29, 2020, at 12:55 PM, Tero Kivinen <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Ted Lemon writes:
>>    And each Jabber client is different in how it takes info to open a
>>    conversation.  Pidgin did not work with what was there.  So a lot of work
>>    will be needed here.  Maybe a new protocol?
>> 
>> Slack works orders of magnitude better than jabber for this.  If we don’t want
>> slack, then we need better jabber.   Slack is a really easy solution to the
>> problem, though—I don’t think better jabber is worth spending time on,
>> honestly.
> 
> Slack does not work with any of the browsers I use (seamonkey). It
> simply returns page saysing "This browser is no longer supported".
> Yes, I know I can get it working if I simply find out what is the
> exact string it wants to have in the User-Agent header, and change my
> browser to fake the User-Agent header and send that exact string, but
> it is bit annoying, as almost every time when I need that feature, I
> need to google up that string to see what it is they need this week.
> 
> Of course as they are using standard html stuff anyways everything
> works fine with my browser after faking UA, it is just that they do
> not want people to use any other browsers than those 4 approved ones.
> 
> Earlier they did just say your browser is no longer supported, are you
> sure you want to continue, and then you could click "yes, go forward",
> but they stopped doing that few years back. That just indicates the
> attitude the developers have, meaning we do not care what you want, we
> do things as we like to do things, and there is nothing you can do for
> that.
> 
> So using pidgin to use jabber is much easier for me than using slack.
> With jabber I needed to set up pidgin settings once, I do not need to
> redo settings every single ietf.
> -- 
> [e-mail]

For me, most of these solutions are missing searchable archives. This is built in to email. In the past, the IETF has published the jabber logs and I have written scripts to sync them with audio and slides. Slack limits history in most cases I’ve used it.

Any solution going forward should have:

1. history is kept forever
2. easily searchable.
3. timestamps for synchronization
4. source of message can be correlated to IETF person database
5. archive available in standard format (no HTML screen scraping please. Yeah, I know, Beautiful Soup is amazing, but I have better things to do.)

Tom