For quite some time, we've been running my IRC/Slack gateway so that our main #indieweb IRC channel is also available in Slack. It's great because it allows people to use the nice mobile-friendly Slack client, while also not locking ourselves into a proprietary platform. The bridge is also used to allow people to join the chat from our web interface.
Prior to the previous IndieWeb Summit (now over 6 months ago!), we only had one IRC channel. At the Summit, we decided to start using more channels to help keep technical discussions separate from general and user-centric discussions. (See https://indieweb.org/discuss for more details). However, the bridge was written with only one IRC channel in mind so it only bridged the main channel. Lately, we've had more people joining the Slack instance and it's started to cause fragmented discussions.
Today I updated the Slack gateway to be able to support multiple IRC/Slack channels!
You can define multiple pairs of channels in the config file, so that the gateway knows which Slack channels correspond with which IRC channels. When a message is received in Slack, a new IRC user joins all the defined rooms and the messages are routed appropriately.
This is live today, and is now bridging the following rooms:
-
#indieweb in IRC to #indieweb in Slack
- #indieweb-dev in IRC to #dev in Slack
- #indieweb-chat in IRC to #chat in Slack
- #microformats in IRC to #microformats in Slack
- #knownchat in IRC to #known in Slack
- #bridgy in IRC to #bridgy in Slack
We have public logs for all the channels except for #indieweb-chat. We've intentionally always had an un-logged channel available for off-topic chatter. That channel has been called #indiechat. Even though we don't have a paid Slack account so the channel history is limited to 10,000 across all channels, I wasn't comfortable bridging the #indiechat room to Slack since it has traditionally been ephemeral, and sending it to Slack means that visibility would change a little. So instead, I used the under-consideration #indieweb-chat channel to connect with Slack since people weren't using that very much on IRC yet anyway.
