Zcash Community Chat Closing

There are at least two projects to do this on GitHub:

I haven’t tried either of them yet.

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Did anyone get either of these (or anything else) to run?

Can they share their recipe (urgently…) or their download?

Never mind, the whole chat was just shut down, so no more API access to use anyway.

(I did try GitHub - willardb/rocketchat-history-downloader: Download, export, and preserve Rocket.Chat user-accessible channel logs and history via the Rocket.Chat API. Designed for users who would like to preserve their conversations without having administrative access on a Rocket.Chat server. before the shutdown and it just threw obscure exceptions and crashed when logging in; and GitHub - frdmn/rocketchat-export-channel-messages: Simple Node CLI tool to export all messages of a given Rocket.Chat channel or private group. required admin access).

Way to go, Zcash Foundation. You’ve killed years’ worth of community discussions and technical information, without bothering to help people keep a copy.

To reiterate what @Shawn said before, and what I’ve written to the ECC when they requested a backup two weeks ago:

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to divide the database between public and private communications, and we’re uncomfortable providing a data dump of the entire database which may include conversations with participants who had a reasonable assumption/expectation of privacy. We aren’t planning on keeping a database backup of the chat for exactly this reason.

The Foundation’s technical capabilities are currently resourced on far more important endeavors (like zebra and FROST) and we didn’t have the bandwidth or desire to work on providing nuanced public backups that still respect users’ privacy — particularly since this chat channel was only partially funded by the Foundation and was a community-led medium for most of its existence. Users had 14 days to backup public channels if they found it worthwhile, but no one on the Foundation’s technical team was tasked to do so.

The only people expressed a desire or concern of public archives were the ECC and you @tromer. The ECC reached out directly to the Foundation 10 days ago and while I couldn’t furnish the complete database — per the privacy concerns above, as I wrote to them verbatim — I offered to personally help them in their endeavor by engaging in the copy/paste strategy that @autotunafish suggested. But I wasn’t going to take (extremely limited) technical resources away from our engineering team to help, nor was I going to advocate for @Shawn to go down a terrible rabbithole of Rocketchat backend whack-a-mole. I believe the ECC was still working on a different strategy for backups — if they succeeded, I hope they decide to share those public archives, but it was not a Foundation priority to furnish them.

Again, the ECC is the only other party that reached out requesting help (and 10 days ago, I might add). I did “bother to help them” by both offering to help on the copy/paste strategy and agreeing with @Shawn to extend the sunset period to give them more time to make their own archives of public channels:

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A bit of context for newer users.

As many know I ran the community chat on my own for years prior to signing it over to (and working for) the Zcash Foundation. It was a stop-gap back in 2016 for when the ECC (then called Zerocoin Electric Coin Company) decided to close the community Slack channel and Zooko closed the r/Zcash Reddit so ZECC employees could focus on important development tasks and not have to host/moderate public discussions. Without the RocketChat the only place for Zcash users to post was these forums (which at the time were ran by the ZECC) since the community was small and no other channels existed yet. Later the ECC gave the forums to the Zcash Foundation and about the same time I gave the chat over to the Foundation. I signed the RocketChat over because the Zcash Foundation is more accountable to the community than a single party.

The closing of the chat is a bittersweet goodbye for me personally, but I am really happy to see that the Zcash community has grown so much that there are now lots of options (Keybase, Telegram, Discord, Reddit) for users to choose from. Horray for decentralization! :tada:

As @acityinohio has requested, since the chat is now closed, to preserve user privacy the database and local backups has been deleted. I support this decision, this is what Zcash is all about, preserving users privacy.

@tromer I’m pretty sure that @daira and others from the ECC had success archiving public channels for posterity, that’s why they requested more time. So if the community wants public channel archives to be posted publicly somewhere (GitHub for example) I would suggest contacting them.

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We did get the rocketchat-history-downloader to run successfully, yes. Thankyou to @Shawn for waiting until that could be completed.

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Element (the leading Matrix client) popularity continues to rise among the FOSS community including Monero. It is a much more appealing place for open source developers than Discord, or Telegram.

Although I prefer Matrix, it is hard to move people to new platforms. Keybase with some Zcash activity seems like a much better option than Discord or Telegram for community chat.

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It is nice to see this subject revisited. Because of Elon Musk there is a lot of attention on both privacy and censorship resistance right now. The most popular Zcash communication platforms right now are not ideal.

@Shawn what is wrong with the Matrix UX? It seems fine to me.

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At time the comparison was between RocketChat and Matrix and most agreed that RocketChat had the better of the two. I haven’t checked it out lately, so it may have improved since then.

@Tsupportisharmful if you like Matrix feel free to set something up for the Zcash Community, there are several like Discord, Telegram, and Keybase already out there.

I’m seriously considering closing the Zcash Community Discord.

Discord is rife with scammers trying to take advantage of new users, and there is literally no way to stop them from joining unless I nuke the invitation code every week. This then breaks all the links here, zcashcommunity, and z.cash websites.

I have to remove 10-15 “customer support”, “Help Desk”, “Admin”, etc… style scam accounts a week, and that’s only because they are dumb enough to be obvious with thier username.

If anyone has a compelling reason to keep it open I’d be happy to hear it.

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Think it’s redundant to have both Discord and Telegram. Telegram has scammers/spammers too but I’ve seen more participation from forum regulars, ECC people, and others with genuine interest in Zcash compared to the Discord.

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Signal to noise is awful - unless you’re prepared to ruthlessly cull idiots it gets bad very quickly.

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Scam/spam accounts are everywhere it cannot really be fixed.

I dont use discord very much I find it too busy, but some ppl prefer it over Telegram, it has cool features that are not available on Telegram, its a kind of eco-system. Its a shame the Zcash Discord isnt as active as the Telegram group. The problem is, the ppl that are active in the Telegram arent active in Discord and vice versa.

I guess the reason to keep it open is the ppl that prefer Discord should be able to be part of the Zcash community conversation.

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I wouldn’t mind kicking out the bad guys so much if the primary chat was actually used more. A few people trickle in a month an ask questions, but that’s about it.

FireIce and I put the bridge between Discord/Telegram for this reason. The idea behind the Discord, and also the Keybase is to meet the users where they most feel comfortable.

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Perhaps slimming down the discord server to have less catagories will consolidate the chat and activity in a few channels. Just a thought

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A good Discord community mod is a full-time job. Maybe ZOMG ?

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More mods isn’t really an issue, currently myself, FireIce and Daira are mods on the Discord.

The issue at hand is if it’s worth the time/effort to weed a field that few choose to use. I want to think it is, but am on the fence, hence the reason for the question.

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My personal view:

  • I’d love a Discord group and have been disappointed in the lack of activity in the current one, so I left it. The good conversations happen here / Twitter.
  • Discord could add value if changes are made. A few of my ideas:
    – Streamline channels for ZCash onboarding/education (eg. investor 101, developer 101, normie 101…)
    – Create a channel to share alpha on ZCash ecosystem news (eg. Agoric coin offering)
    – Invest in a Community Manager who’s full-time job is raffles and vibes
    – If possible, would be cool to create a verified zec holder channel

None of theses suggestions explicitly solve the scam account problem, but i think more engagement will solve the problem. There are still the inevitable spammers in all the good Discord servers i’ve been a part of, but an engaged community can root them out quickly.

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Discord community manager would be a good role to fill (ZOMG funded). Check out how Sushi runs theirs with their “samurais”.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: Help downloading ZecWallet lite