maybe this is related to some other heuristic they're using for determining whether or not to show recaptcha (although this is in a no-extension Chrome on a residential IP address).
Right, they have that at registration but it's either superfluous or it only catches the really easy stuff because they rely on an army of human moderators who spend all day cleaning up after bad actors able to click buses.
In practice it is a major pain to keep up to date, and bots slip through all the time, at least on the subreddit I help moderate. It's a lot of manual volunteer work.
«While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.»
Oh, I thought you just needed a source on the harassment claims. I do not believe there was an explicit rejection, however at the bottom of the blog post, we have...
* We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs.
* We are evaluating products, not protocols.
* We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack.
Given other language such as "modern expectations" in regard to interfaces and being "spoiled for good options" as well as Rust's move to Discord possibly setting a precedent within Mozilla, the posters in the HN thread above don't have a lot of hope Matrix will be selected even via Riot.
Bryan Smart's reply to that Twitter thread depresses me.
>Don’t worry. They’ll totally fix Slack and Discord around the time everyone is using VRChat and VisualTeam. It’s always been this way. Accessibility is catchup work. The next big thing always destroys our gains.
The language at the end of the blog post "We are evaluating products, not protocols" and "We aren’t picking an outlier" almost guarantees we're looking at solutions as heavy as Slack and Discord which I would not have been able to run on my laptop back when I was involved in the switch to Firefox Quantum. It's challenging enough having to advocate for "niche" (my words) features and work out their implementations, but IRC was also necessary to keep track of which builds on what dates would introduce which breaking changes, since this information was published nowhere else, and also to minimally participate in decision meetings that ended up in video chats anyway. If they do move to a heavier, but closed, solution, I hope they also find ways to make contribution less reliant on chat.
For what it's worth, I thought Mozilla had a fairly decent wiki page for IRC[0]. I always believed a streamlined quickstart section, suggesting one or two clients at most, walking through steps to registration and configuring authentication with ghost killing, and how to get activity from when you were offline either via bouncer or just logs[1] would more than adequately address ease-of-use without rolling out a newer, modernized client. Even working from libraries wasn't an issue for me using web-based clients like Kiwi IRC.
As someone in college who has had their classes recorded and posted online, I still go to class because its dedicated time to my brain. There is nothing else I should be doing other than being in class.
The people who don't show up would have not showed up class recorded or not. It is very useful though when you have a morning class miss or be dead tired and not pay attention to re-watch the lecture to get a better understanding.
It seems like whatever recording either I or the professor make are actually useful to me later on. It's always the classes I don't record are the ones I always need.
If no one goes to the physical classroom why not sell the same recorded lecture to a thousand people online instead of the 100 that fit into a classroom?
I had a world history/geography/current events kind of class in college that had an in-person lecture and was also livestreamed and recorded. Lecture hall fit about 1800 people but he also had an unlimited class size "online" section you could sign up for if you didn't get in-person section during early course request. You never actually had to go to class. The professor had to get his own system for taking quizes and handing in assignments since the online learning management system the school used would choke with that many students at once trying to submit things.
Content aside, it was a very interestingly run course. Assignments were at your own pace, you had a large list of the kinds of projects you could turn in for credit. There were quizzes, exams, essay topics, interview topics, and an option for independent projects to get credit. Each kind of project had it's own maximum point value it would be graded out of and the final grade was totally based on how many points your actually earned, not out of how many. Even if you did a shit job on every assignment, as long as you did enough of them, you could get an A. It was a nice way to boost the GPA from just sheer effort rather than actual achievement.
I wouldn't even say smartphone keyboards are strictly better than those of feature phones. Ones based on physical keyboards expecting fingers on the homerow aren't suited for one-handed use. Meanwhile dumbphones get tactile feedback on top of T9 (introduced to me in highschool by a girl who was upset by my "slow" replies prior).
It seems the parent has luck with word drawing, but I remember looking into alternative keyboards a couple years ago and not being impressed. The most enjoyable and fastest writing I've done on a mobile device is with 10-key Japanese input[0]. Unfortunately I do not regularly talk to anyone in Japanese.
[0]: Couldn't find a good article or webpage on this. You can hopefully grasp the core concept from http://miku.sega.jp/flick/en/. Since Japanese phonetics all end in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u with the exception of ん ~ n, the flick directions are symmetric. Coupled with how more than decent Japanese IME is and a few extra keys to navigate the suggestions, modifiers and other common input (brackets, commas, etc. operated by the same flick motions) you can get very fast and precise. I don't get to use it often, but it's a joy when I do. They even made a game out of it :)
I'm guilty of not signing my emails despite associating some accounts with my key. A fear I have is signing but the receiver, even someone in the general tech field, not understanding the surrounding text/attachments and dismissing my mail. I wonder if that's part of why these large orgs don't sign.
I do agree with other comments that if big clients like Gmail abstracted PGP signing nicely for their users, it would put more pressure for organizations to publish public keys and sign lest the people they try to reach complain that Gmail gives them a nice big warning each time they try to open one of their emails.
