How to join the MetaBrainz chat on IRC

How does someone join that chat? I didn’t even know such a thing existed.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Communication/IRC

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IRC is the secret place the devs hide as they don’t like the forums. Or “how to split a community into Us and Them”. :rofl:

This place is just weird…

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I don’t think this is a fair assessment. Those are simply different forms of communications for different needs. One is a forum, with highly asynchronous communication, the other is a chat where people communicate in real-time.

I assume, and hope, you do not communicate with everyone in your life only via online forums. I also assume that even when communicating with the same person you use different forms of communication depending on intent and context.

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Considering how often (not that often, but occasionally, and enough that I notice) questions are answered here with “you should ask that question on IRC–the people who know don’t hang out here”, one could be excused for having that impression.

I’m not exactly sure what remedy I’d propose to this unfortunate situation.

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In a similar manner it’s pretty common to refer questions that aren’t easily answered in a couple of sentences or require broader input from more people from IRC to these forums.

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@outsidecontext This is all I meant. I would just be nice to see them over here a little more often.

Of course I understand the difference between IRC and a forum. I wish people would stop assuming I am an idiot. I just sometimes say the wrong thing or phrase it wrong and I am sorry for that misunderstanding. :frowning: It was supposed to be a joke and I notice your quote unfairly took my laughter emoji off.

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Humor and passionate/defensive responses often share one thing: there is usually some underlying truth in them. I think that is the case here too.

Sorry if that how my comment sounded, but definitely neither my opinion not intention :frowning: In retrospect I formulated my response a bit too personal, sorry for that.

I actually searched the forums of mentions of IRC, and found no case of this. Not saying this doesn’t happen, but definitely not often. A lot of references to IRC discussions, some invitations to further discuss an idea on IRC, mostly in the weekly meeting, usually by one of the responsible team members.

I still think the original assessment is not really fair. It gives the impression that there is some kind of mysterious “dev team”, which operates from its secret Bat Cave isolated from the rest of the MB world. But for one there are two main channels on IRC: MetaBrainz, where indeed mostly development stuff for all MB projects gets discussed, and MusicBrainz, which is primarily a user driven channel where people discuss a lot about editing and style questions. And also everything on those chats happens in public. Everyone can participate or read the chatlogs. Everyone is invited to participate in the Monday meetings*, where the team members give their status update and additional topics can be brought up for discussion.

What is referred to here as the “devs” is also a rather diverse and open group of people. As I understand it this includes everyone who is in some way or another contributing to the technical aspects of MB. But there is no real distinction between those devs and the user community. MusicBrainz is one of the open source projects lucky enough to be able to pay a couple of people, so there are some actual employees. But those are usually recruited from the community as well. And there are others involved with technical or organizational aspects of the various MB projects who are also “just” community members.

Of course the “developers” hang out on IRC a lot, discussing their daily tasks and problems they face. That’s what they use the chat for. But that they never visit the forums is simply not true. Not everyone is as active as others, but I see people like reosarevok (style lead, MB server dev), bitmap (MB server dev), yvanzo (MB server dev), zas (sys admin, Picard), mr_monkey (BookBrainz, ListenBrainz), catquest (instruments), iliekcomputers (ListenBrainz), or alastairp (AcousticBrainz, ListenBrainz) rather frequently here. Just some core team members I remember to see here frequently commenting on areas of their expertise and interests, in no particular order. Most notably this includes the current 3 main contributors to the MB server backend.


*) Unfortunately I’m usually not present in these meetings for time reasons, but I’m otherwise available on IRC. If someone mentions my name or Picard I’ll see that.

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I can’t immediately find an example myself, either. I haven’t been bothered enough to keep a log of occurrences.

The one (sort of) instance that really bothered me concerns the Musicbrainz summit. The first mention of the 2019 summit didn’t hit this forum until two months in advance. I’d wager a lot of money it had been discussed in IRC for quite a few months earlier than that.

I would really have liked to attend, but two months was not enough lead time to plan the trans-atlantic trip (to a city I’ve never been to) that would be involved.

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