matrix-appservice-irc

Sure, t2bot and OOYE discord bridges have told us they are not yet compatible and still months away. The appservice-irc bridge has this issue which is more of a question: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1... which hasn't been answered. These are keeping our space on an earlier version.

I believe the bridges should host a proxy (per-bridge) to expose content: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/180...

The issue in question here is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1... (and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/133...) which accidentally regressed due to other stability work done for Libera (specifically, keeping the IRC-side connections persistent, rather than reconnecting when the bridge starts). As a result there was an race condition edge case where users on the Matrix side could read history in the IRC channel while still connecting the Matrix users on the IRC side. This was one of the straws that broke the camel's back in terms of Libera wanting the bridge disabled. The other was the confusion over https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi....

Oh, I wasn't aware the bridge was actively maintained... Any hope to ever have things like this properly considered? https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/146... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/137... https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/146...

> Matrix is used as a decentralised bouncer for tens of thousands of users to access IRC Matrix as a whole isn't banned, only the bridge operated by Element. If anything, this could encourage more people to run their own bridges (eg. Heisenbridge). > while the bridge has certainly had problems over the years (e.g. occasional delays & a recent spate of dropped messages), As well as flood (multiline messages and edits), spam, harassment[1], leaking secret channels[2], leaking past message metadata and channel membership. [1]: https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1581103659013722112 [2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases... > it's also improved loads too The very room used to discuss the Matrix bridge (#irc:matrix.org) has been dropping all IRC messages for at least three days, and the one to talk to Libera's staf

As a user, this is miserable. Matrix is used as a decentralised bouncer for tens of thousands of users to access IRC (including me) and while the bridge has certainly had problems over the years (e.g. occasional delays & a recent spate of dropped messages), it's also improved loads too - e.g. with support for restarting the bridge without reconnecting all the IRC users (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...) and all the other stuff in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/blob/dev.... By now requiring users to go and contact chanops to ask them to explicitly plumb IRC channels to Matrix, it's just going to waste time for chanops, precipitate weird cross-plumbing failures, or fail outright (given plumbing channels with more than 100 users has to be done manually to prevent abuse). It's very unfortuna

On the Matrix side, we've put a lot of effort into being good neighbours, fwiw - e.g. recently this massive refactor at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/166... to allow the matrix<->irc bridge to be restarted without reconnecting all its IRC users (the single biggest complaint we ever had about the bridge in terms of eroding usability of IRC for IRC natives). Sadly it looks like it wasn't considered sufficient, based on https://libera.chat/news/matrix-deportalling.

Not only that, but if you're disconnected and reconnected again, you lose your ident if your nickname contains uppercase characters or underscores: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...

Matrix could bridge tem as IRC replies so at least IRCCloud users could see/write them, but are not interested in supporting them for now: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/150...

Adapting a comment I made in the wrong thread: This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look. Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all. If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives

This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look. Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all. If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the

Sure - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/130... is the PR, which links to related ones. It’ll be deployed when, uh, libera.chat give us permission to run a bridge, assuming they do.

It looks like they could be fixed as the bridge code is open source. For example here is an issue around messages being split incorrectly: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...