Jenkins IRC moves to Libera Chat

amurleopard

We are happy to announce that the Jenkins community has moved all its official IRC channels to Libera chat. We have started our migration on May 26 as a response to the hostile takeover of hundreds of open source community channel by the new Freenode management. As decided by the Jenkins governance meeting on June 16th, Libera Chat IRC channels are the only official channels going forward.

A more detailed history of the transition is available on the Jenkins developers mailing list.

What did we move?

We have created the following IRC chats:

that currently live on freenode to libera.chat:

#jenkins - general discussion channel for Jenkins users and developers. We no longer consider it a central chat for all things Jenkins, but we intend to keep it available to users who want to keep using IRC.

#jenkins-hosting - Chat used by the Hosting Team to manage hosting automation
#jenkins-infra - Chat used by the Infrastructure Team to coordinate efforts related to Jenkins project infrastructure and the incident response
#jenkins-release- Chat used for Jenkins core release coordination by the Release Team

All other channels have NOT been moved to Libera Chat IRC and were replaced by other channels. Most notable channels:

#jenkins-meeting - the Jenkins Governance Meeting uses combination of Zoom and Google Docs at the moment. We do not longer use the IRC chat for that purpose.
#jenkins-cert - no private chat going forward. The Security Team will use mailing lists only going forward
#jenkins-community - Replaced by the Advocacy&Outreach Gitter channel.

Freenode concerns and disclaimers

Going forward, the Jenkins community does not have ANY official channels on Freenode. All channels are either removed or left abandoned. We no longer manage or control our channels. Most of the Jenkins IRC channel operators use IRCCloud, and hence they were banned by the Freenode team on June 11th. Only a few operators have reconnected since this event.

Taking the takeover of Freenode and hostile actions taken by the new management, we can no longer guarantee any of the following:

Authenticity of registered users on Freenode. All IRC accounts, cloaked or not, might have been taken over by the new Freenode management. Do not trust messages from the Jenkins contributor account IDs there.
Confidentiality of private channels like #jenkins-cert. We performed audit of the conversations there, and we believe there are no undisclosed security vulnerabilities referenced in the channel. After all, this IRC has been rather dormant for the last 18 months.
IRC User Passwords. All passwords on Freenode IRC may be compromised in the future. We strongly advise all users to rotate their passwords if they were used on Freenode IRC.

We have made backups of IRC channel conversations in the abandoned channels. If you need to access the conversation history, please reach out to the Jenkins Infrastructure team.

Acknowledgements

We thank the entire Libera Chat team and all contributors who have worked on creating a Freenode replacement for hundreds of open source communities using IRC. Within just a month, a new platform has been created and adopted by almost all active projects. We remember the Hudson to Jenkins renaming days when a similar mobilization happened in the Jenkins community, and we appreciate all the effort put by contributors.

Special thanks to Tim Jacomb, Gavin Mogan, Alex Earl, and Olivier Vernin for their work on the migration of IRC channels and our automation like the IRC Bot used by the Jenkins hosting team.

What’s next?

In the Jenkins community we will keep using Libera Chat IRC and maintaining user and contributor channels there. Other Jenkins chat channels like Gitter and Slack are unchanged. We intend to gradually replace many of those channels with community.jenkins.io. This is a new portal powered by Discourse. The service is sponsored by Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.. It is currently in preview, stay tuned for announcements. As always, we will appreciate any suggestions and [feedback](https://community.jenkins.io/c/site-feedback/2)!

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