[Wikipedia-l] Why CHAT is not necessaraly a good idea to host

[Gerard.Meijssen]

It is suggested to host IRC on wikimedia servers. The argument being that Freenode may vanish.

There are several good reasons against it.
*It does cost extra bandwith.
*It means that the Mediawiki server park becomes even more complicated.
*This means that there are more eggs in the mediawiki basket.
*All this work is done to a large extend by volunteers. The current infrastructure needs all the attention it can get. IRC on wikimedia servers will devide the attention and that is not a good idea at this moment in time.
*There is no reason to believe that Freenode will be gone in the near future.

It is more important to stabilize the current servers and make them more reliable.