Talk:Research on open source team communication tools

Suggestions

Hi David. I see for Rocket.Chat you mention "Supports Markdown in messages". It would be really useful to know what syntax the other communication tools support. e.g. I know Telegram supports single and double back-ticks, but iirc it doesnt support markdown links.

For Matrix.org , you have only mentioned the riot.im client; please give a good summary of the clients that are available.

Also you should add another one, as Telegram isnt open source. John Vandenberg (talk) 16:29, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

I posted some additional pros & cons for Matrix to GNOME's desktop-devel-list a few days ago: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-January/msg00044.html. It might be useful to incorporate some of these into the review. Also, it's worth counting contributors from the https://github.com/vector-im repositories as well as the https://github.com/matrix-org repositories to get a more accurate grasp of the size of the Riot+Matrix ecosystem. (If one counted all the other contributors to Matrix clients/bots/bridges/servers out there the contributor list would be even bigger!) --Matthew

Thanks for your both suggestions, I am currently researching on Kontalk as an alternative to Telegram. Also thanks for the reference for Matrix, I will consider that when editing! Divadsn (talk) 15:21, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

On Zulip's bugs

Hi and thanks for doing this comparison!

I contribute to Zulip and am glad that you investigated Zulip.

When you mention that there are "Lots of bugs still present" in Zulip: could you talk a little bit more about whether it's the number of bugs that influence your appraisal, or whether there are specific bugs that you find particularly difficult to live with? I have been using Zulip every day since late 2013 and I have found it to be a pretty robust experience.

The mobile apps definitely need work. I'm investigating right now the situation with our replacement React Native app, and we're progressing towards some big improvements in our Android app, but I understand that the current state (especially of the iOS app) is difficult.

Thanks, Sumana Harihareswara 15:45, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I should also mention that there's a UI refresh underway right now; if you try out the streams management/subscription interface (e.g. https://chat.zulip.org/#subscriptions ) you'll see what it's like.

I'm also linking to this conversation in the GitHub issue about Zulip comparison documentation: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/1296 so you can respond there as well!

We always welcome your feedback at https://chat.zulip.org/ as well, in case you want to chat more interactively with us about your thoughts and concerns, and what would make Zulip work better for you! Thanks. Sumana Harihareswara 15:51, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Maybe I did something wrong when setting Zulip up for my own test purposes, I was doing that on a slightly old VPS running Debian 7 Wheezy. I will get the latest release and try that on my old laptop running Kubuntu 16.10. :)

I also see that the latest release was from 28 Septembre, so should I maybe try the latest dev release? Greetings, Divadsn (talk) 19:26, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

@Divadsn: It would be fine to try the latest dev release, but there's no need, as Zulip 1.5.0 is now out. I recommend you make sure to try it again on a machine that suits requirements -- production requirements in case you are going to do a production install, as opposed to a developer install. I think trying this might solve a lot of your problems, as Zulip has never supported Wheezy! Sumana Harihareswara 16:38, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Student outreach (Zulip)

I will echo Sumana's comments about Zulip being robust. I'm one of the earlier contributors to Zulip (500+ commits), so I am somewhat biased, but I also have extensive experience using the product as a result. We have several large sites using Zulip, and it's generally considered to be very stable, and of course folks do appreciate our threading model. We have also field tested Zulip as a chat tool for two recent student outreach programs: OutReachy and Google Code-in (aka GCI). We are nearing the end of the current GCI session, but we have students who are still engaged with the project on https://chat.zulip.org, and we can help you solicit their honest feedback on Zulip as a tool.

--Showell30 (talk) 16:34, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Nice to hear that! As I mentioned above, I was using the latest release available from GitHub, which was released on 28 Septembre 2016. And I appreciate all done work by you students at GCI, but these are currently only in the latest dev release, which is not intended for use in production. I would also like to try a newer version, if this will be also suitable for use in production. Divadsn (talk) 19:35, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Title

On Meta, such a page would normally be named only open source team communication tools. On the English Wikipedia, Comparison of open source team communication tools. --Nemo 16:20, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

I used the title which was suggested in the GCI task and also on Phabricator. Anyway, thanks! :) Divadsn (talk) 19:49, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Should Telegram be considered ?

I see couple of communties are running on Telegram as well (WikiToLearn, for eg and parts of KDE). They are open, and have excellent bot/API support as well.01tonythomas (talk) 08:01, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

FYI Telegram has been used in the Movement as a group chat for Wikimedia Conference participants last year and this year. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Group chatting in Telegram

It's also used by several teams at the Foundation for their team chat. An example in the image to the right. --Krinkle (talk) 00:17, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

We also have a Telegram-IRC bridge for some channels: wikitech:Tool:Bridgebot. Such bridges are common in several free software communities, for instance Fedora, and they enable seamless two-way communication. Nemo 14:02, 9 February 2020 (UTC)