Restarting bridges and user support chats

Two years ago, we took user support to a whole new level by bridging seemingly incompatible messengers. Back then, IRC users were gradually moving to Telegram. IRC was becoming a desert, and it was getting more and more difficult to get quality support. The question of choosing a popular messenger rose sharply. At that time they tried to block Telegram in Russia and it did not suit many people, for various reasons. Therefore, we chose a fairly original and more interesting solution - to link chat rooms from different messengers. Therefore, IRC, Telegram, Matrix and XMPP chats were “bridged”. This allowed Live USB users to immediately enter the same general support chat room using a preconfigured IRC client.

In the meantime, things have happened that have been affecting the chats. Errors in the 500 GB bridge bloated the Matrix database. The management of Freenode changed, and resentful adherents began spamming everyone to death. The time had come to re-bridge and solve the problems that have been accumulating!

Matrix
Fixing the bridge has stopped clogging up the Matrix database with events. To avoid problems in the future, we’ve put users and chats into separate servers. To get a Matrix account at calculate.social, just go to your profile on the main Calculate Linux site and activate your account. If you already have a Matrix account, for example on matrix.org, you can find Calculate chats on chat.calculate.social.

IRC
The profusion of spam on Freenode, urging us to move our chats to the new Libera Chat server, led only to criticism not only about Freenode, but also about the new project. So we decided to start our own IRC server, solving some problems along the way. There was a limit of 14 characters on Freenode for user names, to be written in Latin letters only. There is no such problem on the new server, the names can even contain emoji. Most of the names are broadcasted via the bridge without interference. Also, there is no limit on the number of users to be forwarded by the bridge. To connect to IRC, to to the irc.calculate.social channel via port 6697.

Telegram
Fortunately, there are no changes here. The same bot bridges Telegram chats to other messengers.

XMPP
We did support XMPP, but we do not any more. Should you be many to use this protocol, we would again!

You can evaluate the support chats directly in your browser, at https://chat.calculate-linux.org. Please note that the names of IRC channels have been changed. The default support channel is the English-speaking one, named #chat.
The upcoming nightly build of Calculate Linux will fix the pre-configuration of IRC clients to work with the new server.